RE: Service and Support - Part II

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: rob@dekko.com
>
> Confusion.  'no longer on maintenance' might be translated from 'no longer
> under warranty'.  Much like leasing a truck - maintenance is your
> responsibility.  You would think that IBM would like the money of sending
> you a notice 'hey, your warranty expires on xx/xx/xx.  You ought to
> purchase maintenance before then.'  I don't think they do.  It's gotten to
> the point that our local CE's try to keep track of warranty periods and
> then do IBM's maintenance sales for them.

This seems to be the situation, Rob.  I'm not 100% sure of all this yet, but
it seems that when you lease a machine, you get a one-year warranty.
Evidently, my warranty expired, but nobody sent me information on how to get
maintenance.  I did get a phone call from a technician in my area telling me
that someone from IBM would send me a fax.  I wasn't too worried about it,
since I was planning to upgrade my leased machine to a new model, as soon as
I got a BP who could do it (note my recent issues with BPs).

I understand it this way: you can upgrade your leased machine once each
year.  Also, the warranty is up at the end of that same year.  So, assuming
that cutover takes a non-zero amount of time, there's no way to have that
original machine under warranty during cutover unless you buy maintenance.
So the end user has to decide between a year of maintenance on a machine
they won't even have in shop, or a finite period of time under which the
machine has no maintenance.

The final result being that I have to choose between running my business on
a machine that could die any moment (it's lost two drives in a little over
12 months), or incurring a $2300 invoice to replace a part that shouldn't
have failed in the first place on a machine I don't even own.

Joe