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Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
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if the client wanted to have an up-to-date, respectable website, it must have pull-down menus;
- if they wanted pull-down menus, they must do it in Macromedia Flash; and
- if they wanted Flash to work on their website, they must switch to Cold Fusion Server.
The vendor was a Macromedia shop with over a dozen employees; they are now out of business.Then there's the software support service contract. It took me months to get them to bill us, then they send a bill for $16K, we send it in, then when it's time to place a service call it's "who are you again?". Our $16,000 is missing, no one knows where it is, even though I have a copy of the canceled check they cashed. We are now getting dunning letters demanding payment at the same time getting a cancellation notice on another contract we had with them along with a credit invoice. So now THAT system is up-in-the-air.
They are the most screwed up company I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. I won't even go into the crap software they use. Their linux fiber HBA drivers use sg version 3.0.16 for lk 2.2. When I tried to update it, everything broke. Turns out, and this was told to me from the driver's author no less, that sg version 3.0 was a development branch only, and that every minor release changed the interface and that EMC had *NO* business putting this crap into production. I ended up getting EMC code out of it (thank god I had source) and folding it into sg rev 3.1x under lk 2.4.
The site engineer I have is the only bright spot in the entire company. He's trying to get my contract issues resolved. It's time critical, because I've heard they are farming out their higher ed contracts to Dell (which actually may be a good thing).
EMC may be good to megacorps that spend 10s of millions a year on their "frames", but if you only spend a half a mil (which we did), from my perspective at least, it seems like they could care less about you...
The place I live sells accounts to rooms, single port in a room, you call in, 30 dollars to sign up, and 20 for a month, sounds good, right? .4k
So I call them up, ask them, what's the service, the plan, the billing, etc...
don't worry, its 2.2 mbps down, and 384kbps upload!
Ok, sounds good... sign me up.
well, aside from a quick little problem with the router attaching itself to your mac address,
it turns out that its sharing one road runner account through the whole apartment complex.
I call up tech support "can you tell me why my internet connection sucks so badly?"
re: "because its a sucky connection on sucky routers" (that's what tech support said, at least THEY were being honest).
well, can you fix it?
Sure, let us kick some other people off the network...
eeee!
Right now, I download at about 20-30k, and my upload is around the ballpark of
I can't play CS, because my choke is at 100 and my ping is 2000.
Give me a 36.6k modem! Pleaasseeee...
Disclaimer:The "Human" attached to this account is unresponsible for anything unless it wants responsibility.
The Christmas-before-last, I told my parents I wanted a GeForce2 video card and a stick of RAM for Christmas. Well, they went down to CompUSA, and came back with a video card, 256MB RAM (like I had asked for) also they came back with TV-tuner card, an Ethernet cable (25ft) and a monitor switching hub. We took everything back except for the video card and RAM, and demanded a refund for the stuff, because according to my parents, the salesman told them I had to have the other stuff in order to install the video card and RAM. They were this close to getting my parents to buy software to go along with it. Good thing their budget just ran out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Me What's that?
S It's an e-meter. It tells you the state of your health, spirit, etc (I don't actually recall what she said) Do you want to try it?
Me Yes.
S OK, hold it like this...
Me Wow. I can make the meter move pretty much any way I like just by gripping it a little more tightly.
S Don't do that.
Me How do you know people aren't doing that subconsciously?
S You have to let go (or something like that). This was accompanied by a look that told me she knew I was a skeptic, she had dealt with us before, didn't really care, and simply wanted to move on to the next sheep. (it's amazing how much can be communicated with just one look sometimes).
The only other time I've ecountered a Scientologist was downtown. He asked me if I wanted to see a free movie. I figured there would be at least a half hour of propoganda with the movie, and I didn't feel like sitting through that so I declined.
The way I see it, Scientology is to the private sector what the lottery is to the public sector--a way to tax stupidity.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Well, he was partly sorta right. If your programmers misuse 64-bit data operands where 32-bit data would do just as well, the application is going to waste about half the memory cache space (at all levels), so it _will_ run much slower. 64-bit flat memory is useful, especially for large databases, but programmers still have to understand what they're doing (and what the compiler will do, how that will impact the processor, memory, etc.) or they can build programs that run slower than they did in 32-bits.
See the 64-bit computing faq that's up at AnandTech right now.
I'm posting this anonymous for a good reason - I know people who have been fired for even hinting at this stuff publically.
I work for the largest ISP in New Zealand - we are strongly associated with the largest Telco (who have a virtual monopoly on landlines)
We have been told to outright lie to customers relating to a number of issues, including
* Dropping port speeds to virtually 0 on a number of P2P applications
* Running out of IP addresses to give to paying DSL customers
* DSL network outages due to extremely poor design - we are not allowed to confirm these until "the word" comes through - even when half the country is without service.
We have to tell these lies every day - I don't think it will suprise anyone to know that Xtra (the ISP) has a content partnership with MSN.
The worst part is - half this stuff gets out in press-releases before we even get told at the helpdesk; and we're still meant to lie to customers even when the info is public!
Despicable if you ask me - I'm leaving as soon as I can.