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Cisco Ships Mexican Folk Music On VPN Client CD
jemduff writes "So we receive our brand new firewall from CISCO and all goes well with the setup... until we try to upgrade our VPN client and we discovered that the installation CDs from CISCO contain 12 tracks of Mexican music!!? Not too bad if you're into that kind of music ... too bad if you need to get onto your corporate network. How much did those routers cost, again? 5,000,000 pesos?"
Me pregunto si, tal vez se existen un grupo llaman "Cisco"?
Proverbs 21:19
these kind of things happen. and considering the size of the company involved (and the volume of product they ship), it's almost guaranteed to happen once in a while.
in this case it might not have been a problem on Cisco's end, unless they press their own CDs. whenever you depend on third parties (i.e. outsourcing manufacturing) you expose yourself to these type of factory screw ups, and no amount of QA will prevent it unless you have complete vertical integration.
all you can do is pick your suppliers carefully and obtain compensation for factory mistakes such as these. and if you're lucky, the screw up won't damage your company's reputation or customer relations.
at my work we've gone through several different printers and CD/DVD manufacturers for this exact reason. we didn't have any mixups this bad, but there have been many sub-standard shipments causing delays.
but by far the worst case was when my boss, against my warnings, decided to pursue DRMed audio CDs. i forget the name of the DRM scheme we went with, but it was a popular DRM technology that many of the majors were using at the time. we ended up getting a flood of complaints from customers who couldn't get their CDs to play on their computer or CD players. it ended up costing the company a ton of money and likely drove away a lot of customers. the stupid thing is, there was no evidence that our music was being pirated, and sales were actually on the rise due to the newly launched online store.