RE: California Software

Dan,

At 4/20/01 11:59 AM -0400, you wrote:
>I would like to point out that nobody here was trying to finagle (sp?) a
>freebie out of CS.  I personally have no interest in the product and had no
>vibes that anyone else responding to Fran's post was trying to strongarm CS
>for their own benefit.  Fran herself said that she was willing to pay a
>reasonable fee to replace the dongle.
>
>So, Mark, what exactly was your experience?

  I'll try to be brief, but it does require a little background.

  I have been using their products since about 1983, when Baby/34 
debuted.  I have sold and installed several development and numerous 
runtime systems.

  Fast forward to the late 90's.  I'm working on a conversion from a 5363 
to Baby/36.  There was one interactive program that kept locking up at a 
particular point in the program (when updating a record.)  This was the 
main entry / update program in the system, so the rest of the program, data 
conversion, procedure changes and installation work that was done became 
basically useless.

  We initially thought that the problem was the network environment (NT 
server, Win95 clients), which *should* have worked.  So I brought it over 
to run it on a totally standalone system with the same results.

  Bear in mind that a service contract was paid for and active.  I sent 
them the defective code.  They were able to duplicate the problem in their 
labs.  A halfhearted attempt was made to debug the problem.  (I know it was 
halfhearted because I spoke to the programmer - there was only one - that 
worked on it and it amounted to about 1-2 hours a WEEK!)

They dragged it out for several months.  I even had a conference call w/ 
several people including some VPs to get this resolved.

  Then all of a sudden it "worked fine" on their end (with NO code or 
config changes!!!) and they refused to work on the problem any 
further.  Remember that I had a service contract!  As far as I was 
concerned, this was a problem in THEIR runtime code and they had a 
responsibility to fix it.  They just passed it off as a "config / Windows / 
sunspots" problem, which they claimed is not covered under the 
contract.  Puhleeez!!

  Bottom line: I lost about $9,500 in out of pocket revenues that I could 
not collect from this contract and numerous other conversion contracts that 
were already lined up.  They were made aware of the situation, yet refused 
to stand behind their product.

  There is more to tell, but that should give you a good idea of how NOT to 
treat a customer.

  -mark

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