Re: Software Vendors (And US too) - A small rant

I know of a company including several persons there personally including the person who made the mistake. They were asked by a huge potential customer what their systems ran on. The response: "AS/400". The customer immediately and finally closed discussions with: "Yeah well IBM quit making those over a decade ago so you clearly don't have the ability to support our needs with that." Game over. No explanations, backpedaling, clarification, could help. The potential customer believed it was a mindset. What does the company really use? IBM i 7.1 on POWER7. Oops.

Names matter.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 12/11/2012 5:06 PM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

Note to software vendors: If you want me to consider your software for
the IBM i operating environment running on Power Systems, please do not
call it, iSeries, AS/400, System i, or my personal favorite System/38.
Clearly if you don't know the name of the system your working on I
cannot trust your software. Most of the vendors monitor this list and
don't hand me the line: "That's what our customers call it....." Don't
correct the customer but always use the correct terminology when you are
speaking and guess what, they will start using it too....

What brought this rant on? Three calls today from vendors asking if I
would like to talk about their iSeries or AS/400 products..... Geesh..
Now I'm starting to sound a bit like Trevor without the accent.....

I'll be quiet now.