Need *credible* vendor support stories

[plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]

George Toft wrote:
> 
> I'm collecting stories illustrating how useless vendor support is.
> I've been in Corporate America for 2 years, and Big Government for
> much longer, and I found [almost invariably] that in-house talent
> matches vendor talent.  Therefore, the only conclusion for why
> we pay $Millions ($Billions?) in support contracts is so the
> company can point the finger when things go wrong.

two issues come to mind.  Legal defensability (i.e.finger pointing), and
warm-fuzzies (i.e. making upper management feeling safe; kind of like
Dilbert(?) peeing in a warms suite)

> Today is a fine example.  After spending about 10 hours on the
> phone (cummulative), and being assured that our issue was a high
> priority, and there were many meeting taking place to discuss
> our issue, one of our administrators sat down and poked around.
> 30 minutes later he fixed the issue.  Our in-house guy (not even
> a programmer!!!) finds and fixes the problem (defect in code) in
> <1% of the time the vendor spent on it?  And we pay several
> $tens of thousands per year for this?  Puhleeeease.

let's here it for open source.

BTW, ask the company if they will give you cut rates on support by
fixing their problems ;-)

 EBo --