Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!texsun!texbell!nuchat!moray!siswat!buck
From: buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: IBM bug notification/update policy
Message-ID: <439@siswat.UUCP>
Date: 8 Aug 89 17:06:33 GMT
References: <550@pan.UUCP>
Organization: Photon Graphics,  Houston
Lines: 38

In article <550@pan.UUCP>, jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) writes:
> 
> For those who are not familiar with this piece of trash that IBM calls
> corporate policy, it goes like this.  When a customer calls and reports
> a problem, the customer support engineer checks a database of previously
> reported problems.  If the same, or very similar, problem has already
> been reported and fixed, you hit the jackpot!  The grand prize is an
> update diskette which (maybe) fixes your problem.  This policy leads
> to a situation where customers constantly feel they are missing out on
> updates, so they start calling IBM support and playing "20 questions".
> The customer says "I have a C compiler problem"; the support person
> says "What kind of problem"; the customer says "I'm not sure; what kind
> of bug fixes have you got for the C compiler".  Then they go on down
> the list.  Great fun.

Since the defect support people are not very technical, the first thing they
do is say "We will send you the latest updates overnight.  See if these fix
your problem." So we effectively blow two more days before they even start
to think about our problem, as well as wasting our time checking that, yes,
that bug is still there after the latest slew of updates.  Just hope
everything else still works after all these updates are applied, since you
can't back out changes once they are accepted.  For example, we once had
something similar to an updatep disk with fixes to uucp updating the Fortran
compiler to the latest level, while breaking something in Fortran that
had previously worked.  And this idiotic policy extends even to security
bugs, as a previous posting of mine in this group demonstrated.  The main
effect of this quiet update policy is that customers learn to call every
week or two and demand the latest update disk, whether they are having
problems or not.  I have better things to do than rediscover the same
bugs in AIX/RT that someone else found weeks ago.

When is the quintessential marketing company going to wake up and listen
to their customers?  Maybe when the promised nirvana of the follow on
RT falls flat on its face due to policies like this...


-- 
A. Lester Buck		...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck