Re: Another lousy Borland experience

"Wayne Niddery [TeamB]" <wniddery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:44ce0cc5
@newsgroups.borland.com:

Jolyon Smith wrote:

How do you "sack" a customer who has already bought your product?

Offer them their money back since that is going to be cheaper than
attempting to support a customer that cannot be satisfied.


Ah, but this is easier said than done. Especially if the software was
purchased as part of a larger contract that includes maintenance and
support over a period of time. Then it becomes a contract dispute, which
can often devolve into lawsuits and other ugliness. And there is the
tendency of software companies to want to sell things like Software
Assurance, which a) gives the softare firm a stable income and b) ties
the customer to the vendor. But it also means that the customer cannot
simply "fire" the vendor without incurring huge business costs.

In my mind, this is the huge benefit to open-source software. It's not so
much the value of the software itself (which, generally, is at least of
as good a quality as the commercial stuff), but rather that a company can
hire any number of consultants or integrators and fire them for non-
performance without fearing that their line-of-business software will
suffer -- they can simply hire some other consultancy to pick up where
the first one left off.

mr_organic
.

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