Allergic to IT?

It is allergy season in California and the Tech Wife is miserable.  I am miserable too, but mine could be allergies or a sinus infection.  Regardless, neither is fun, making this time of year anti-climatic.  It is great that 'winter' (I am using quotes because California, in my opinion, does not really have winter.) is finally over, but it is hard to enjoy the trees and flowers blooming when you are sneezing every fifteen minutes.  This whole situation got me thinking about things that I would be allergic to if I were an IT consumer.  (It's a fun list this week because I am doped up on Benadryl.)

• 3 year hardware warranties.  If you extend them, the vendors make you pay a fortune.  If you do not extend them, you are buying more stuff.  Sometimes a fourth year just makes life easier.
• 90 day software warranties.  Who installs enterprise software in 90 days?  You might as well prepay maintenance for three years because the initial warranty is useless.
• Any vendor presentation that shows a financial services customer as a reference.  Yes, I want to run my business like Bear Stearns and Countrywide.  (I would prefer a vendor that has a customer in the high performance computing industry.  Those organizations beat up products really good so if your product makes it through, it must be decent.)
• Buy 2 boxes (servers, storage, etc) and get the third one free.  'Buy one, get one' deals are best left for supermarkets and other retailers.  There is something wrong when a vendor starts throwing in extra equipment just to get your attention.  I am all for throwing in software, but extra boxes crosses the line.

There are a lot of things that are changing to solve these allergies (Software-as-a-Service, etc), but until vendors hear more sneezing at these tactics, nothing will change.

Comments

[Scott Moreland]

Brian,
I'll see you tomorrow but I just saw your blog. I was V.P. of Engineering at TeraCloud. Most of the old guys have gone but I still know a few. Boulder Ventures was a VC backer of that company and Peter Roshko of Boulder Ventures was on the board. He tried to get me to move to Seattle at a breakfast meeting but I told him if he could see my home in Colorado, he would understand why he was wasting his time. (Peter lived in the Bay area.) I was out washing my truck one afternoon and Peter and his wife Noelle drive up in a rental car. He is now my neightbor.

I'm looking forward to meeting you tomorrow.