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More bad adviceYesterday, we talked about taking the advice of unqualified people when designing your network. One was a vendor rep and the other was an ill-informed friend. Today, we'll talk about a vendor who just made a bad product, and a well-informed friend who was blinded by the technology. We'll talk about two companies, Aurora Widget Company and Naperville Thingamajig Enterprises. Both are manufacturers. The owners, Boris and Natasha, know each other through their mutual involvement in the Loyal Order of Moose and Squirrel. A while back, they discovered that they were both using the same accounting package from an obscure little software company. However the owner of Naperville (Natasha) was into the technology. She had been out to visit the vendor in Silicon Valley, attended lots of seminars, and was using the latest version of the vendor's new MRP software. It would slice, dice and generate really cool information. She wasn't sure what she would do with it, but it was righteously cool. The owner of Aurora (Boris), on the other hand, was very happy with the old system, but found out that it wasn't Y2K compliant, and he'd have to upgrade to the latest version. At the next lodge meeting, he asked Natasha what she had heard. "Cool, very cool. You'll love it!" So Boris went ahead and ordered the new software and, per the vendor's specifications, about $50,000 in new servers, workstations and network infrastructure to go along with it. It took MONTHS to install. There were patches and more patches. There were installs and de-installs. Boris was miserable. He had invested an enormous amount of money in new systems and he wasn't seeing any payoff. In fact, it was costing him twice as much time and effort as before with little additional real benefit. He finally found out, after a while, that what he had bought was really "alpha" software...barely tested by the vendor, let alone any users, other than Natasha. And he found this out too late to make the leap to another product, since Y2K was closing in. The morals of the story? Even if your friend is well qualified to give you advice about the technology you're considering, make sure that she's paying attention to BUSINESS issues, and not just absorbed by the cool stuff. In this situation, Natasha really enjoyed the attention from the vendor, the challenge of making the software work and being on the bleeding edge. And she honestly felt that this was the best and coolest product she could get. What Boris should have done was ask about returns on investment, payback, ease of management, total cost of ownership, etc. But he was blinded by her knowledge of the product and her enthusiasm. If your friend uses "cool" to describe the product, stay away...stay very far away. Make sure that what you buy is REAL product. Get multiple references and call them. Visit them. Visit the vendor. Make sure you're buying the real thing, not cobbled together code. When buying software, you have to tread very carefully. Everyone has advice. Your rep, your employees, the dealer, and your friends. Most of them are giving you biased or bad information. All you can do is take EVERYTHING with a grain of salt, demand proof, ask for business justifications, and get it in writing. You'll have to make your own decisions, but you must be very careful. You're not only spending lots of cash, you're spending your time and effort, which are even more valuable.
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