Re: Software Piracy (WAS: Good/bad docs)

["Engstrom, Douglas D." <EngstromDD -at- PHIBRED -dot- COM>]

George Mena:

This is written in reply to:

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Reading your post, I do find it amazing the length some companies will
go to just to save a buck.  For a company to buy enough copies of Office
yet not pay for the user manuals is truly lame of them.  Companies like
this should be hounded out of existence for having such myopic
management.
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Well, no.  I work for one of those companies, and the motivation isn't
so much saving a buck (though I think we do) as a massive vote of "no
confidence" in Microsoft's documentation.  We buy licenses without
documentation from a Microsoft-authorized source (you can get some
*very* flexible terms that way) and make third-party books available on
an 'ask for' basis.  For minor upgrades, we home-produce a "What's new?"
document.  For more significant upgrades, we supplement that with an
optional, over-lunch demo/Q&A sessions.  For totally new systems, we
offer training classes, and for new people, there's a nice bunch of
online tutorials. We'll also pay for third-party training from
departmental budgets.

And of course there's also me and the rest of the help desk.

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Companies like this not only fail in the long run, they
also make the lives of their sys admins that much more unbearable during
regular business hours by not letting their employees get up to speed.
************************
Nope. Sorry.  Pioneer Hi-Bred is 72 years young, and we're the people
you have contend with if you want to be a player in the North American
agricultural seeds business. (And not insignificant in most other parts
of the world, either.)

And our sys admins are reasonably happy.  And when they aren't, they
tend to be made unhappy by insufficient WAN bandwidth and esoteric
configuration issues in NT Server, not user ineptitude.

Point of all this being:  There are lots of ways to deliver end-user
support, and the "free" docs from Redmond may not be the best one.

Doug Engstrom
engstromdd -at- phibred -dot- com


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