Ferrari Red Diesel Porche
2010-08-24 01:32:59.415226+00 by
meuon
3 comments
Walk into the Porche dealer.. Take a test drive of a black Porche 911 with all the goodies. Squeeeling the tires a little in a curve, scream: "I like it, I'll take it". Pull back into the dealership with a big grin and a happy sales-droid.
Take a chair in front of the big desk, sip a cup of coffee served by a buxom lass, and tell the sales manager that you loved the ride in the Porche 911, and you want it delivered tomorrow with a couple of minor modifications: You want a Cummings diesel motor in front of the dashboard and that it should be Ferrari red. Plop down a large deposit in cash and walk out.
In the high dollar corporate IT world... it happened again today. They test drove and -liked- the Linux system, have for weeks. And then asked for it on Windows Server and MS-SQL. It happens all the time... We would laugh at the guy at the Porche dealer, shouldn't we laugh in IT?
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comments in descending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2010-08-25 03:30:38.759226+00 by:
ebradway
There is one part of the sales process that is nice - it's when the customer whips out the checkbook...
And that's a really great perspective on management attitudes towards MS products (and, by extension, MSCEs): MS products are the squeeky wheels. They got wedged in there because of some lame excuse (app X requires MS-SQL... the new VP says we have to run Exchange... etc.). Then heroes are made of the MSCEs saving the day when the MS systems fail. The whole time the Linux apps just keep going, and going, and going...
#Comment Re: made: 2010-08-24 20:06:21.031226+00 by:
meuon
24 hours later.. turns out the IT Director (good guy) didn't realize he had some Linux talent in house.. and some Linux servers doing mission critical apps.
Manager: "Why didn't I hear about them?"
BOFH: "What to say? They just work..."
He also didn't realize we already had API's to do the things he needs to do, which came out in the discussions. I hate the sales process.
#Comment Re: made: 2010-08-24 18:46:42.795226+00 by:
Dan Lyke
What's their concern with running it on a different back-end? I'm beginning to think that some of the worry about "we don't have anyone who knows how to admin Linux" is that Windows can be such a freakin' mess that it requires some serious specialization.
If you pitch it as "there's this box, see, and you plug it into your data center, and..." and sell it as a service rather than software...