posted 22 years ago
I work for a fairly corporate minded company, and I thought I'd share an insight that my direct manager gave me, regarding this issue.
Many of us developers shake our heads and wonder why it is that we pay tens of thousands of dollars for software that has bugs, poor support, horrific documentation and worse... is not 100% standards compliant, even though it says it is.
Then we look at Tomcat, and well... not so buggy, newsgroup support that you can search and see a proper response from, pretty good docs and well, it's the reference implementation. Why wouldn't we use it?
Let's move up the food chain. Let's say (for whatever reason), a production site goes down. It's a catastrophe, and our client is worth $100k a year to us. We will loose money on this if it's not fixed. In other words.. it's a nightmare scenario, and it could happen to anyone.
If we are using Tomcat, who is there at Tomcat Inc. that my manager's manager can talk to? Where is his counterpart? When this needs to escalate beyond the cozy confines of developer to developer, and if it comes down to $$, the upper manager types want *someone* they can get on the phone and cajole, harrass, plead with or threaten with a lawsuit.
As far as I know, Tomcat Inc. doesn't exist in this form. But *every* company that sells a product for money has someone whos job it is to "make things right" (giggle). I think you get what I mean. Some district sales manager, or a director who will either (wow) honestly work with the upper manager types to 'get it done', or at least (more likely) throw a bone to us, in the form of a discount price or free 'support' for next year.