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Recession Turning Software Auditors Into Greedy Traffic Cops
judgecorp writes "As the recession bites, software auditors are cracking down, and some are simply exploiting loopholes and technicalities to meet their targets, according to analyst Forrester. They may be within their rights, but they aren't endearing themselves to users; Steve Ballmer faced weary customers in London last year, and admitted Windows licenses have deliberate 'gotchas.'"
Don't run Windows. "Software auditors" are just about unknown to users of any other platform.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They may be within their rights, but they aren't endearing themselves to users; They are not looking for endearment, they are looking for a paycheck.
Home of The Suki Series
Maybe, but then they're limited by what the court has stated they can do. If you voluntarily allow them access then the sky is the limit.
So they lost $20,000 present day value for $2,000,000 present day. Sounds like a good deal for Adobe.
Sure, until today's 200 employee shop turns into tomorrow's Google and the CEO decides that since he isn't going to buy Adobe but still needs the equivalent of their software, they're going to develop an equivalent, open source it and put Adobe out of business.
It's never a good idea to piss off your customers.
Pissing off "one customer", when you have millions, and when you can get money from that one customer with little or no blowback? Seems like a winning scenario to me.
Except its stories like this that keep me from using any adobe products and then recommending alternatives for any clients/friends/family when I can. While I alone have only cost them a few tens of thousand dollars in lost revenue I know there are thousands of others doing the same. So while it might be a winning scenario in that one instance it wont be in the long run.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
"Ballmer also suggested that education should be given government stimulus funding to enable young people to gain experience on the computing systems they would meet in the real world."
Seriously Mr B, go fuck yourself. You don't need the money and young people, on the whole, are pretty good at working things out for themselves as they have a "click and see what happens" approach mixed with the ability to ask another kid who knows. Doesn't matter if it's OpenOffice, Office 2007, whatever, if they really want it to do something, they'll find a way. The weak point is quite often the teachers.
Seriously, in the UK you cannot be a teacher without a University degree. A University degree should teach you to analyse a problem, research the problem and apply a solution. In software, this boils down to "I can't do X in program Y", go to Google and type "how do I do X in program Y", click links until you find answer and follow instructions on page. Most of the time they seem incapable of following this simple idea. They'll even come in and as me then watch me hit Google and search for a solution (often the first result returned) but it never dawns on them to do the same themselves next time (and no, support isn't my job). I showed a year 7 how to find something out using the "F1" key and he was amazed, he just didn't know.
The best thing for education, would be for kids to be trained to work stuff out for themselves by teachers who are trained to work stuff out for themselves. This "teaching people to use the software they'll use in the real world" argument is crippling and the seeming inability for people with far higher qualifications than mine to work out even minor problems has seriously dented my faith in the higher education system.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Let's see:
-10 days notice
-at most once a year unless you get caught
-if you make a minor mistake, you pay up and you're done
-if you make a major mistake, you pay up 120% and you're done
Sounds better than anything Microsoft or Adobe have to offer.