4 ms·

I would argue that IBM's business is selling golf courses and Orlando software-and-wine conferences to CEOs, for having witnessed it, because honestly, which sy

by tajen 11y ago

I would argue that IBM's business is selling golf courses and Orlando software-and-wine conferences to CEOs, for having witnessed it, because honestly, which sysadmin would accept to run such horrible pieces of software (IBM Rational Suite or IBM FileNet), let alone... pay for it, really? It looks like nothing more than corruption of officers on fiduciary duty. Secret pricing is exactly how they conduct that business: With no public price, employees can't challenge IBM's consultants to provide the value they're charged for. If all from Atlassian to SpaceX publish their pricing, any other behaviour should trigger a SEC investigation.

dvtv75 11y ago
There's also the rather odd "Sign up to see prices." I did sign up to see what Autodesk Maya cost in my country's currency. At the time, in $US is was $3,995 for a single seat. In my country, it was around $US12000. I did what any good person with a goodly amount of cash in the bank would do - I said "$#@! it," and bought a house instead.
- AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
  You can get a house for $12k?
bpchaps 11y ago
Other smaller companies act like this, too. Was invited to a steak lunch for automic's UC4 (job scheduling) at a fancy dinner far away from anything relevant and at no point, during a two hour talk, was anything of substance actually said. They were trying to sell us UC4 (we already owned it, ffs) yet they didn't even show us the damn interface! Everything was fluff upon fluff upon fluff. And the execs - wearing some of the most expensive suits and watches I've ever seen - friggin' loved it. The best part is that they brought in McDonald's UC4 engineer to talk about how good it was. When we asked him how they automated its deployment and where they got their init scripts from, since UC4 didn't include any (wtf), his answer was that it was basically his full time job to deploy it by hand, since he didn't know how to automate anything. Somehow he turned his lack of skill and McDonald's apparent lack of good tech leadership into a positive thing - which the execs also loved. These are the kinds of people making large, absurdly expensive software decisions for multi, multi billion dollar companies. I have nightmares of trying to figure out their database schema. 2-6ish letter German acronyms for table names.... Their wiki gives a good impression of their character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic
- geon 11y ago
  They use a large, expensive platform for automation, and they don't know how to automate?
  - emp_zealoth 11y ago
    Imagine just how much of an unfair advantage those companies must have to basically set hundreds of millions on fire and still expand! :)
  - bpchaps 11y ago
    Yep. In complete fairness to the guy, it sounded like he knew the work was unfairly shoveled onto him. That fairness can't be extended towards his management, though.
- rlonstein 11y ago
  I've had similar experience with CA and the Autosys product. Great lunches, nice cocktails, and weeks of arm twisting to get to speak with actual engineers and get into a tech session. Forget about DB schema, we ended up figuring that out on our own. This was a product we already owned. In comparison, BMC was up front with an engineer during the eval and provided us with great documentation including the DB schema. We didn't go with them or others in the automation space for... reasons... but it was a very different experience. [edit: Why the downvotes? My experience with another 800-lbs gorilla confirms the parent comment]

by tajen 11y ago

dvtv75 11y ago

There's also the rather odd "Sign up to see prices." I did sign up to see what Autodesk Maya cost in my country's currency. At the time, in $US is was $3,995 for a single seat. In my country, it was around $US12000. I did what any good person with a goodly amount of cash in the bank would do - I said "$#@! it," and bought a house instead.

AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
You can get a house for $12k?

bpchaps 11y ago

Other smaller companies act like this, too. Was invited to a steak lunch for automic's UC4 (job scheduling) at a fancy dinner far away from anything relevant and at no point, during a two hour talk, was anything of substance actually said. They were trying to sell us UC4 (we already owned it, ffs) yet they didn't even show us the damn interface! Everything was fluff upon fluff upon fluff. And the execs - wearing some of the most expensive suits and watches I've ever seen - friggin' loved it. The best part is that they brought in McDonald's UC4 engineer to talk about how good it was. When we asked him how they automated its deployment and where they got their init scripts from, since UC4 didn't include any (wtf), his answer was that it was basically his full time job to deploy it by hand, since he didn't know how to automate anything. Somehow he turned his lack of skill and McDonald's apparent lack of good tech leadership into a positive thing - which the execs also loved. These are the kinds of people making large, absurdly expensive software decisions for multi, multi billion dollar companies. I have nightmares of trying to figure out their database schema. 2-6ish letter German acronyms for table names.... Their wiki gives a good impression of their character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic

geon 11y ago
They use a large, expensive platform for automation, and they don't know how to automate?
- emp_zealoth 11y ago
  Imagine just how much of an unfair advantage those companies must have to basically set hundreds of millions on fire and still expand! :)
- bpchaps 11y ago
  Yep. In complete fairness to the guy, it sounded like he knew the work was unfairly shoveled onto him. That fairness can't be extended towards his management, though.
rlonstein 11y ago
I've had similar experience with CA and the Autosys product. Great lunches, nice cocktails, and weeks of arm twisting to get to speak with actual engineers and get into a tech session. Forget about DB schema, we ended up figuring that out on our own. This was a product we already owned. In comparison, BMC was up front with an engineer during the eval and provided us with great documentation including the DB schema. We didn't go with them or others in the automation space for... reasons... but it was a very different experience. [edit: Why the downvotes? My experience with another 800-lbs gorilla confirms the parent comment]