Re: Software Vendors (And US too) - A small rant

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know of a company including several persons there personally including 
the person who made the mistake. They were asked by a huge potential 
customer what their systems ran on. The response: "AS/400". The customer 
immediately and finally closed discussions with: "Yeah well IBM quit 
making those over a decade ago so you clearly don't have the ability to 
support our needs with that." Game over. No explanations, backpedaling, 
clarification, could help. The potential customer believed it was a 
mindset.  What does the company really use? IBM i 7.1 on POWER7.  Oops.

Names matter.

    - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 12/11/2012 5:06 PM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
> Note to software vendors:  If you want me to consider your software for
> the IBM i operating environment running on Power Systems, please do not
> call it, iSeries, AS/400, System i, or my personal favorite System/38.
> Clearly if you don't know the name of the system your working on I
> cannot trust your software.  Most of the vendors monitor this list and
> don't hand me the line:  "That's what our customers call it....."  Don't
> correct the customer but always use the correct terminology when you are
> speaking and guess what, they will start using it too....
>
> What brought this rant on?  Three calls today from vendors asking if I
> would like to talk about their iSeries or AS/400 products.....  Geesh..
> Now I'm starting to sound a bit like Trevor without the accent.....
>
> I'll be quiet now.