At 5:56 PM 2/9/95, Steve Dorner wrote:
the attention of the other mail vendor, the one with the non-compliant
software.
Reminds me of a story...
In the early days of the Internet "industry" I managed a small team
developing some TCP/IP product set.
The product was almost a year old when I got a call from one of our
large customers. I had worked with him for several months. He was
knowledgeable and good to work with. He said that he had just run a test
and our Telnet client had a bug with a particular server he was starting to
test. I thought this odd, since our product was quite stable by then and
had been widely used with pretty much the full range of existing products
from other vendors.
I had him take protocol trace (a luxury that one does not often
have with customers) and he sent it to me. It turned out that the other
product was incapable of dealing with Telnet option requests coming from
the client. I reported this to him, noting that it was a truly creative
deficiency on the part of the other vendor, and a massively profound
deficiency, at that.
He said fine, and then asked me what I was going to do to fix our
product.
I sputtered and repeated that it wasn't our bug and that he needed
to get the other vendor to fix THEIR friggin' product.
He said he understood that, but that we were much more responsive
to fixing problems.
Perhaps, Steve, you are TOO good at being responsive to customer
problems???
But please, please, don't change.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu