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Come one, Come all and see the Mundie Microsoft's Monkey-Man shock, offend, and promote M$ all the way to bank.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
--Mohandas Gandhi

Ok, let's play their game an ingnore the bastard.

Dancing is illegal.

They sweep Loch Ness for the monster.

Douglas Adams dies.

Hmm..wait a tick. All those things already happened. ; Just might be the reason that my boxes are all running on AMD.

Dancing is illegal.

They sweep Loch Ness for the monster.

Douglas Adams dies.

Hmm..wait a tick. All those things already happened. ; Just might be the reason that my boxes are all running on AMD.

Has anyone else noticed that the American "Democratic" Party is looking more and more Socialist every day?

LOL.

There are not even close to the current Socialist platform. Perhaps in another ten years... If you don't believe me check this out.

There are companies out there that go the extra mile in delivering a quality solution. The two most recent examples that come to my mind are Vividata and Sangoma. Vividata assisted with tuning PostShop to crank out TIFFs an impressive speed that was well beyond it's marketing promises. Sangoma brought out early a very interesting way to run PPP over HDLC using using Linux (this was a year and half ago). Support was stellar and immediate. Not to mention fun being the lunatic fringe.

There are so-so companies out there as well. Pixel translations, Install Shield, and Sun come to mind as OK support. All of them seem to push out support issues on the technicalities.

The worst of the breed are the vendors that won't give you the time of day. The worst of the worst is Kofax. Find a salesman, buy bulk units, purchase support, and they will tell you that you have to buy X toolkit to ask that question. Arrgggghhh! I get angry just thinking about them. Too bad they are almost a monopoly!

A lot of the time I don't think it has much to do with cost. Some of the worst vendors for support have been the most costly.

I think part of the problem is some people expect support to solve all their problems including integration and deployment issues. I cannot stand it when people sit idle waiting for tech support from some vendor to solve their problems for them. It ain't gonna happen if you don't work with them actively. If you haven't read the docs, applied the patches, and RTFM'd get off the freakin' phone lines.

I cannot resist comment on this as well.

Extortionate service contracts are now routinely offered -- special arrangements by which people who spend thousands of dollars on hardware and software spend hundreds more just for "priority access" to get the kind of minimal support that's standard in other businesses, and that ought to be included free with their purchases.

I am sure the vendors offering such contracts would be willing to roll the costs into the product itself. I for one am glad that I don't have to pay for support for all of the clueless "technicians" of the world.

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