Re: Service and Support - Part II

["Leif Svalgaard" <leif@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Patrick Botz <botz@us.ibm.com>
> I only wish IBM was smart enough and agile enough to actually have the
> coordination that would be required to do this manipulation "of the
> customer base." Apparently, Leif thinks IBM developers sit in architecture
> design discussions and say "boy that would be really cool, but it would be
> too easy and, don't forget, we have to manipulate the customer base. Lets
> make this really hard and complex in order to generate more calls to the
> support line to make it more costly for IBM to support  and to drive
> customers away because it's too hard to use." It just doesn't happen...

the manipulative complexity is not at the architectural level (although that
is complex too) but at the marketing, support, configuration, and sizing
levels. Do I know something about that? Yes, because I have been at
the receiving end of that. Am I a lone voice in this? I don't think so.
Is this complexity deliberate (as I claim)? This kind of complexity is
not unique to IBM. I have in front of me a catalog from Dell. I can
buy PCs in several configurations that are different is subtle ways
such as to obscure the price of things and are such that sometimes
when I need feature A I have to buy feature B as well because
they are not sold separately. IBM does the same, it's called
"marketing".