Vendors want to have their cake and eat it
Original article date: January 1998
This month I’d like to rant about software, because it seems to me that the vendors want to have their cake and eat it. You see, we don’t buy software anymore we are granted a licence to use it, but it still belongs to them. And yet they don’t seem in any way bound by law to offer any meaningful support.
What’s more (and this really galls me) they can discontinue a product (such that if you want to buy a few more licences of a product you have been using for a few years and which works OK, you can’t) and yet if you copy it yourself they can still prosecute you.
I recently tried to buy a few more licences of a product that I use every day. They had discontinued the product (when it last sold, it was (UK pounds)55, I think) but they graciously offered to sell me a piece of paper which granted me the right to make some more copies and install them at a cost of (UK pounds)99 per extra copy.
But I guess that’s just good business on their part. And I’ll let them off because (like a lot of DOS software) it’s fast, stable and compact.
What bothered me far more this week was when a certain (well known) suite of new office software failed to install. (Or rather failed to reinstall to the hard disc, having been un-installed because the ‘run from CD’ installation had been unusably slow.
It turned out that the grief stemmed from a known bug, and the helpful guys in the appropriate Compuserve forum got me going within a day. The forum is not staffed by employees of the original software company, of course. But there was no attempt by the software suppliers to tell me of this known bug either when I purchased it or when I registered it. And not everyone who gets a piece of (UK pounds)300 world leading software home has lifesaving Compuserve access and a day to spare.
What’s more, further chat with the folks in the Compuserve forum made it clear that I should really install the ‘Service Pack’, (which is basically an official bug-fix) if I knew what was good for me. Again, I have also never been told such a thing existed.
Seriously, hanging’s too good for them.
Now, it strikes me that by the end of 1999 we will have the Millennium bug, the Euro and probably a new version of Windows all vying for the ‘computer nightmare of the century’ title (and my money’s on Windows, incidentally). But the Millennium one could be the messiest, because of the number of people it takes by surprise. And as a recent newspaper article which I read pointed out, it’s no good fixing your own systems if all your key suppliers go belly up in January 2000.
So I guess that being ‘Year 2000 Safe’ will soon be as much of a key letterhead claim as ‘IS09000′. By the end of this year, I for one am going to start asking all my key suppliers what they are doing about it.
And I’m also going to start planning my own personal Millennium preparations move all my money from the bank to under the mattress where it can’t be deleted by a system crash, stock up with firewood for when the gas and electric companies fail, start ‘running down the freezer’, steer clear of phones, planes, trains and automobiles (and lifts, apparently!), and most of all, whatever else I do, I WON’T PANIC!
Griff has been final testing for Y2K at GB Innomech and claims the only non-compliant kit is the answerphone.
January 1998