--- On Mon, 6/16/08, Roy Brown 

> I have never bought this argument, and I never will. People
> bought 3rd-party products because they saved them money. Sure they
> would have liked to keep more of the savings, rather than handing them
> over to the 3rd parties. Who wouldn't? But has anyone ever claimed
> that these products cost customers more than it saved them? In such a
> case, the  customer would be crazy to persist with the product. And I
> don't recall any 3PV having a monopoly he could exploit, simply because
> there was no  alternative....
> 

Roy,

I can not disagree with you more.  I could give you a whole novel of horror stories.

If I had a dollar for each time Ecometry undersold a system, just to get in the door.  The system was woefully inadequate for the customers purposes, but the upgrade charges were 2 to 3 times the original cost.

e.g.  A customer in the San Fran area, bought Ecometry on an A-class for 125,000... before it was usable the customer parted with closer to 1/2 million... and all profit sharing was lost for several years after.

Or how about the customer that was running Ecometry on a 979-300... they needed to add a 4th CPU for a data warehousing application.  Remember no additional software benefits at all, but Ecometry felt they fully desevered $125,000 for that 4th CPU.  Needless to say, I help the customer work around this stupidity.

Want some more?  We had 60 HP922's running finacial and manufacturing software... we wanted to upgrade them to 928's.  We did not change any user licenses... We were running MultiView, which was designed with Cognos. Cognos felt they deserved 1,000,000... that is one million USD... this was back in the 90's when the dollar still had some value.

In working with my management, I put together a plan to buy out the 922 from lease, and network them.... Cognos and our VP had a meeting.  Cognos decided 30,000 cost for transfer was a better option.

Roy the list goes on, bait and switch, what ever your want to call it. 

And I only named a few examples, quite frankly some of the culprits still moniter the list, and everyone knows who the are.  

Cognos had a chance to reedem themselves when HP announced the end of the HP3k.   Cognos put together a plan to offer free license transfers.  The one customer I know of had to pay 37,000 for the "free license transfer".  Cognos lost thier support dollars from that account.

-Craig

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