You might need some grey matter to understand software, 
                           but there's evidence that this just plain ain't true

Ah, what the hell do I know about the software racket, anyway?  Well, I think I know it all.  If you think not, then read this, and if after that you still think I don't, well, go to hell.

Here's what you'll find here on this dumbass industry I'm in:

SALES   AND    MARKETING

Development, support, marketing, and other aspects of a business organization can often lumber along, unaware of the mess being generated in other quarters of the company.  But sales is always volatile and in flux, whether things are going well or poorly.   If things are bad, they rip you up; if they're good, they push you even more.  Especially working in remote offices, I've often been amazed at how blissfully ignorant of corporate conditions were the support staff actually based at corporate HQ.

This is because sales staff often hides their issues, because exposing them also means exposing the perks they keep for themselves, the absolute crimes they've committed, or the absurd advantage they've taken of the rest of the company.  So here's some of the nonsense I've either observed or even personally committed, all in the name of commerce.

Let's state one thing up front: if you're in a publicly-held firm, there is tremendous pressure on upper management to hit stated revenue goals each and every quarter. This pressure is passed down to the sales force, to the point where everybody starts doing goofy shit to make those numbers. And people get away with it. And sometimes they get caught. And sometimes even after they get caught, they move on to other positions in other sales organizations. And God doesn't strike them with lightning bolts or John Tesh albums. It's a frigging crime.

September 2007: Got an email from some guy at runaware.com, promising a "revolution in software demos." The mail was in HTML format. The background was black. One of the headings was in white. One of them was BLACK. Their phone number was in BLACK. Black text on black background. The rest of it, most of it, was links. By default, links are dark blue. On a black background. Yeah, I want these guys to show me how to do better demos. Holy shit.

November 2006: I flew to New Jersey to work with a giant database company on a joint deal. The team they assembled was a bunch of middle management types, and nobody worth a shit at all to the project. The only tech guy they brought was from another partner. He didn't wanna open his mouth about a thing. So all we got in a day-long meeting with them was "we've got to cross the goal line" and "let's not play to the competition, let's play to our own strengths" and "we need to couple our synergies" and blah blah blah. Their head sales rep for the project knew how to sell their other products, but not the ones we needed, so naturally she kept pushing those products she knew, which pissed off everybody. And whenever any of the meetings or calls got into any details, she bailed out, every single time.

The customer had submitted a list of questions that indicated they knew their shit. But this team wanted to dumb down the presentation to the point where we were going to treat our audience like idiots. Then they turned out to be the most educated group I've ever presented to. So we hit our goals, but they were all ankle-high.

On subsequent calls, one of their guys could never be heard from his speaker phone. Six or seven times each call, we'd take turns telling him to speak up, change phones, do SOMETHING different. Every damn call we went through this bullshit. This team of incompetents never took ownership of ANYTHING. Their partners (including my company) ended up with all the deliverables. The deal went badly, and these morons threw us under the bus. We were given permission to take the deal on our own, by THEIR management, who easily recognized the retarded nature of their team. 
 

April 2001: IBM paid some idiots named Ch'rewd to advertise their new version of Linux. They did so by spray-painting logos on Chicago sidewalks.  In Chicago, they call that grafitti. IBM was fined, and had to pay cleanup costs.
 
 

Leave it to Microsoft, who bought their way into the Internet and only sweat the details AFTER their customers scream for a service pack, to give a new product an Internet-unfriendly name.  Microsoft came up with C #, which, for the longest time, couldn't be typed into a search engine. 
 

Who're YOU kiddin' ???

At the airports, I would see the ads on the wall, big as hell, from Informix.  They read at the top  WAY FAST.  Then they state, simply, INFORMIX.  At the bottom, they read WAY TO WEB.  Sorry, but when I think web, the last thing I think of is Informix.  They couldn't even get client-server right (anybody here ever work with New Era?), and even after Sybase bit the dust, they couldn't capitalize, and Oracle ate their lunch.  They wrecked themselves overpaying for companies, and their latest acquisition, Ardent, ate them up from the inside, and they finally got sucked up themselves.  Informix was to the web what shoelaces are to the web. 

MEETINGS

Customers, or even prospects, will often want you to practically live at their place while they're still evaluating your products. On occasion, you have to be willing to walk away from one of these, lest they eat all your available time.

Ed and I did a meeting with a customer recently in which we discussed how we would fit their project. To kick it all off, we had to go around the room and introduce ourselves, as well as express our hobbies and to share with the group the answer to that age-old question, "If you were a dog, what breed of dog would you be?"

This is what happens when an old-school manager is running the meeting.

We also met at one of the Big Three in Detroit in spring '99, which was in a way identical to a meeting I attended at Sears a couple of years earlier. In both instances, the guy running the meeting wouldn't let it end. We end up hearing his entire high-tech history, from school, through programming on rocks and sticks in the early '70's, his huge break into management, to his introduction into ecommerce. Like any of us give a rat's ass, and by the way, I have a plane to catch.

THEN we all stand up, start gathering our stuff, and he starts bullshitting about housing costs, and his neighbor's vacation, and the sod at his new house, and then one of the idiot vendors we partnered with feels the need to feed the guy's aimless conversation with his own insights. And so some of us who've got our bags over our shoulders now put them back down on the table, realizing we're stuck for at least another few minutes. None of us really cares if this guy's dog has worms. We don't care that his commute is thirty-five minutes one way. And lookee here, I still have a flight to catch. Let me out. Let me out.

I finally break things up, by putting my bag on my shoulder once more, and thanking everyone for their time. In other words, "shut the hell up and head out the door."

Some meetings can stretch over days. Right now I'm hearing about the history of the customer's current project. I don't give a flaming fudge that they evaluated some development tool over a year ago. Why does this matter? Don't tell me you decided against Informix for a dozen different reasons. You picked Oracle, that's dandy. Move on. How much salary is being wasted in this room right now? Let's say an average of $40/hour (some of the attendees are only mid-level desk-jockeys), times twelve, times eight hours times three days (when you're on salary, there's no overtime for eleven-hour meetings), it comes to a staggering$11,520.00. Yowch.

I stay sorta busy during these things, however. I write replies to emails (to be sent in ten years when the meeting's over), notes, things to add to my novels, suicide notes, and poetry to my wife. I actually write poetry to her quite often. I'm so damn romantic, it makes me sick.

What's all this crap about taking cel phone calls DURING MEETINGS?  Turn the goddamn thing OFF !!!  Nothing is ruder, nothing more definitively says to a prospect or client or co-worker, "Whoever you are, you're not as potentially important as the person calling me."  Summer 2000, in Dayton OH for a meeting at NCR, along with the large lady engineer from Netscape. Every time her phone rings, she announces, without looking at her phone, "I'm sorry, I have to take this."  And she gets up and starts conversing before she's even out of the room.  Later, when our host is walking me to the elevator, he says to me, "If that f______ broad answers her phone one more damn time, I'm feeding it to her.  And she doesn't need to eat any more."
 

Seminars and trade shows

November 2007: Oracle Openworld, Moscone Center, Dan Francisco. I watched in bemused horror as Darth Vader and princess Leia performed a stupendously bad skit about PCI compliance. During the course of it, Darth used the term "beeyatch." Poor taste, and it drove away two ladies who'd been watching it. Funny for the wrong reasons, embarrassing, painful. These are people who've made a lot of mistakes in life.

These events are your chance to pimp publicly for your organzation.  Strangers gather to hear and see you make an ass of yourself while you try to convince them that the vaporware your PO-box-based bunch of scam artists are peddling is worth a few bucks and addresses some compelling indsutry problem.   HA.

Seminars reek because:

• you rarely do them alone.  You're typically doing them a partner company.  If their presenters stink, you stink by association.  Spring of '99, we were on the undercard of another vendor, where the sales guy was a bore, his engineer was a drip, and one of their other partners made eye contact ONLY with one distant corner of the room, ignoring all others, including the three women seated directly in front of him.

 
• The facilities are  strange to you as well as your attendees.  A common staging ground for seminars in Chicago is the O'Hare Hyatt Regency, actually in Rosemont.  It's a cavernous place, and they hide the meeting places very well, and nobody who works there can ever tell you how to find your meeting.

 
• Wear and tear.  If you do a string of seminars through a string of cities, you get better at your material, but you get just plain tired of presenting it, and it can show.

 
• Attendance is always a fraction of what the marketing people tell you it will be.  If they tell you there are fifty people registered, expect less than ten actual showups.

 
• Marketing won't tell you until two days in advance that you must present.  Then they email you a fifty-slide Powerpoint presentation to give.

Trade shows reek because:

• The hired help.  At a lot of places, you still have to accept the help of the unionized goons who cart your booth and other stuff in and out of the hall.  McCormick Place in Chicago has been notorious for yeeeeeeeears for the way the unions have gouged and extorted money from exhibitors.  I've been with several companies who had terrible experiences with the place, and have personally seen the retaliation that befell customers who refused to hire out some apprentice to plug in their standard electric line, or assemble equipment they'd never seen before.  Supposedly in 1999 they've finally come to some agreement, between the city and the unions, to tone down the strongarm tactics so McCormick could stop losing business.  Check out my Utter Screwups page for additional horror stories.

 
• Food is hard to come by, all the vendors are swamped, it's incredibly expensive because they've got a semi-captive audience, and the offerings stink to begin with.  Hot dogs, nachos, cardboard pizza.

 
• Larger number of unqualified idiots attending your presentations; at least at seminars, people are there because they're interested in the subject, while at trade shows, you get who-knows-what kind of moron floating by.  Internet World, Jacob Javits Center, NYC, December '96, they let just about any pinhead on two feet into the place.  We had kids in parkas come up and want our giveaway junk.  Sometimes they'd ask for demos.  I'd ask them to bring their moms back with them.

 
• GIVEAWAYS: if you have tee shirts or pens or 3-D buttons or some other marketing crap (aka "collateral"), the vultures will descend.  At Database World, December '94, Navy Pier in Chicago, we gave away tee shirts.  It was like being mobbed.  The shirts could say I'm With Stupid  and the fools would still grab for them.  Halfway through the first day, we decided, you had to sit through some kind of demo and/or fill out a form to get a shirt.

 
• Marketing sets them up, and presumes that the personnel in any given city will staff a seminar or trade show.  And they don't tell the local staff of the event until the week before, which is a problem if you've scheduled out of town meetings.  I've gotten marketing morons called on the carpet all the way up to the CEO for not warning field staff about upcoming shows.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T 
        PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS

As I state in Bad Management, if sales at a company aren’t great, the company will rip and shred to fix it. And if sales are going well, they will rip and shred to make things go even better, and either way, they wreck things.

One of the worst things you can do when making changes is to HIRE A GUY FROM ORACLE. In the past, there’s been this witless notion that an Oracle guy will ratchet up sales. “Those Oracle guys, they know how to do it, just look at their numbers.”

Here’s the fallacy exposed:

The numbers have always been good at Oracle because in the SQL database market, they are the big gorilla. Sybase neutered itself with back-to-back bad releases (anybody remember System 11?). They took the approach of selling other people’s software instead of their own.

Informix crippled itself by overpaying for companies, starting with Illustra (whose founder I admire a great deal, but $499 million? C’mon.). They also overpaid for VMark, and got expensively into the blade business. 

Progress sold everything except their own database. And for many years, MS SQL Server was just a toy, and in many ways still is.

So by pure attrition, Oracle came out on top. They’ve been less than stellar in other ventures. But they excel in SELLING A COMMODITY PRODUCT. They don’t provide a solution, they provide database seats. Their sales guys only have to ask, “How many do you want?” Too easy.

From observation of my own companies, as well as others, I’ve seen Oracle guys screw up time and again when trying to being that “magic” to other companies they join. How?
 

1. They treat whatever new product they’re selling as a commodity (cuz that's what they know). They think they can shove it down people’s throats.
2. They have no concept of solution selling. They’ve never had a solution to sell, only a one-size-fits-all product.
3. Old Oracle guys in new jobs wreck the culture wherever they go. Their reputation is already blackened because when they come in, they come in as “the Oracle guy.” But then they back that up with draconian measures toward existing staff.
4. When they find they can’t just get away with threats, as they’ve seen done often at Oracle, they end up making promises they can’t keep. They over-commit and under-deliver.
5. In a cultural leftover from working for Larry Ellison, they blurt out things, and worry about consequences later. In one memorable meeting, I heard an ex-ORCL guy babble, “Oh yeah, Oracle themselves have bought up 4.9 percent of our company. Pretty soon, they’ll make their intentions known. That’s our exit strategy.”  I pointed out to him, I thought he was full of shit, and also that, even if what he’d just said WAS true, you can’t SAY shit like that in front of people who aren’t on the Board of Directors. Eventually he repeated this stupidity so many times, he got spanked by the CEO and told to shut up.
6. They take credit for anything they can. At one place, the Oracle guy came in right in the middle of Q3, which turned out great after a lackluster Q2. He had nothing to do with it, had met with no one, had attended no sales pitches, just came in at the right time. He took credit for the bump in sales anyway. He still hadn’t really done much of anything notable by end of Q4, which also turned out great, and which he ALSO took credit for.
7. They expense EVERYTHING. I’ve seen this multiple times. If they buy a hot dog, pick up their dry cleaning, gas up their car, they submit a receipt. Their entire personal life becomes the company’s burden.
8. They try to make it look like they’re in on everything. We watched an Oracle guy hear about a big new name account signing, and he immediately got on a plane, flying first class around the world with zero notice (so you KNOW that was not a cheap ticket), so he could ….. we didn’t know what. Touch the purchase order in person before it got faxed in? Pat somebody on the back? Even the sales guys on that side of the Earth were asking “Why did he come? We already had the order.”
9. They’re ARROGANT. One Oracle guy told me about getting busted by an air marshal when he pulled out his phone and turned it on, to make a call before landing. 

Keep your damn mouth shut

Feb 2007, I weaseled out of going to a big trade show on the west coast, because of family considerations. I would’ve liked to go, because I got so many dinner invitations from old colleagues who were going. Then the Thursday of the show, I started getting all sorts of calls from those colleagues, congratulating me on the successful sale of my company. Because I’m not ready to be owned by the huge, monolithic company that was supposedly purchasing us, I called my CEO, horrified. He assured me that this had NOT happened, and could I please track down the source of the rumors. I indeed did this very thing, discovering that some gabby son of a bitch from the other company was telling everybody we knew that his outfit had indeed bought mine. Since this could get him fired, fined, prosecuted, sued, and a kick  in the nuts, I let him know through third parties to shut the f__k up. He did, but a certain amount of damage was done.
 

BEA guys are really arrogant. They remind me of the Netscape guys, during that very brief period when they hadn’t yet screwed up. BEA screwed the pooch in many ways, and their arrogance is unfounded.  Their techies are all geniuses, but they miss the point. Don’t piss off your customers with your attitude, because you’re not getting new customers like you used to. 

Way back when, it was the pioneers who sold Weblogic, while the rest were still selling Tuxedo. Then Weblogic took off, and the older guys all wanted in on the action. The newer guys, who had done the evangelizing, suddenly had their patches split, and went from having multiple states to having pieces of individual cities. What that does is piss off the guys who’d established the market and the relationships, and fixed it so everybody made a little bit of money, and nobody made a ton. More feet on the street isn’t ALWAYS the answer.
 

There's no excuse for email stupidity any longer.  We've all been using it long enough.  So I can't explain the doofus in finance who sent us all a huge, UNZIPPED document.  I, along with others, sent him a polite note suggesting he zip these things in the future.  So the next day, he sent us all a note, apologizing for not zipping, and attached the SAME DAMN DOC AGAIN, zipped.  Duh!
 
 

Scott McNeely, honcho at Sun, whose sole purpose in life seems to be going after Bill Gates, wants all software to be free.  He keeps buying products and putting them on Solaris boxes gratis. Just so he can peddle hardware.  The problem is, a whole lotta people are losing their jobs over it. 

Netscape reps sold LDAP database licenses. McNeely started making 200,000 LDAP seats free with Solaris.  He couldn't give away 100, or 1000, or even 10,000.  He gave away 200,000.  This quickly dried up 80 percent of the LDAP business out there.  Sun and Netscape had a half-assed alliance going, and McNeely found a great way to take away incentive from the Netscape folks for pushing his products.  What the hell was he thinking?  This is just one of the many good reasons that the Sun-Netscape alliance, also known as iPlanet, went completely to hell. 

The other downside to giving away all software, such as Microsoft did when it got into the Internet market, is taking away the incentive to improve things.  Netscape and Internet Explorer are full of bugs.  Netscape Composer is an utter piece of crap.  The editor in Explorer is even worse.  But who has any incentive to make them better, since they don't make money on them, because these dummies got into a give-it-away-for-nothing duel?  THERE'S NO INCENTIVE.   So we're stuck with crappy browsers and peripheral tools.

I once bought a copy of Opera, and loved it. Now I love Firefox, from Mozilla.

Bill Gates has been taking the billions he made by unfairly killing off his competition, and funding AIDS research, poverty, all sorts of society's ills. Good for him, and for the lucky secretary he finally scored with. God bless 'em both. He's stepping aside at Microsoft to spend more time making the world a better place. Seriously, it's a good thing.

This does not, however, excuse all his past practices, or those of the scumbags who have worked for him. 

Microsoft can never leave well enough alone.  They just had to get into the browser market, and crush Navigator.  Then they got into the high-end database market by finally cleaning up SQL Server.  They sell competing products for everything at minimal prices, just enough to avoid another anti-monopoly / unfair practices attack, but in essence they tortured Netscape to death, which also put holes in AOL and Sun.  Take the damn desktop and be frigging happy, Bill, and let everybody else feed their families, please.  It's almost like genetic engineering: just because you can doesn't mean you should.

July 2006: I read recently that Bill Gates has been reviled by many for the way he crushed Netscape. I differ from this opinion for a couple of reasons. First, Netscape had blinders on as they competed. They didn’t see it coming? Second, I dealt with many of their engineers who were typical pony-tailed Valley types who thought they could levitate into any situation and get away with a slacker attitude. I did a seminar with a Netscape guy once who showed up in ripped jeans and a tee shirt, to present in front of two hundred people. When his demo crashed and he couldn’t get it working, there was little sympathy. Third, on the sales side, Netscape guys were the sleaziest buttholes in the world. It was a distinct pleasure watching them drown.
 

I’ve always despised partnering with Microsoft. They’re slugs. They lie like hell to customers and partners. I looked at going there in 1995, but all they wanted to know was how much certification I’d had (and MS certification is a joke, since it completely ignores process and logic in favor of rote memorization). They always paid shit, and made up for it in stock options. At one memorable meeting at one of their regional HQ’s, my arrogant host had me do a pitch in their cathedral of a meeting room, plugging my laptop directly into a port on the giant table, with my presentation showing up on the big screen at one end. He told me he was building a new house, and putting one of those screens in his rec room. Well, then their stock crashed, he ended up with just the skeleton of a house, which he had to dump.
 

Rich as they are, Microsoft still finds ways to get stuff for free. They jobbed a large consulting firm into building a whole bunch of connectors at that firm's expense. The other firm even held a launch party for the joint work, and paid for that as well. Then Microsoft buried the whole thing, after they'd learned what they needed to learn about how to build the stuff themselves.
 

Microsoft reps and engineers drive me nuts with their supreme arrogance.  I'll go into a place with my product, and the MS guys already in there will say, "You need to show us that you support our products."  And I tell them "Huh?  I don't have to show you jack shit .  I have to prove myself to the CUSTOMER.  Remember HIM?"

In January 2000, I had a Microsoft rep say to me, "They [ the customer ] aren't confident of your support for Windows 2000.  Do you have any references running with Active Directory?"  I replied, "First of all, the customer doesn't give a shit, YOU guys do.  Don't tell me that you're the customer.  You're just another vendor in here trying to win a deal, like me.  Second, you guys haven't released Active Directory officially yet.  Do YOU have any references running with it?"  And of course the answer was NO. Except for COMPAQ, a beta reference they flogged for yeeeeears.

It's also quite annoying when Microsoft guys will tell you they want to partner, but the second you're out the door, they run to the customer and say, "You don't need those other guys, we can build all that for you."  And then the customer turns around and repeats all that to the other vendors, just so they know what they're up against.

In Canada, Ed and I were told my Microsoft that they were helping the customer we were going after choose vendors for security. We needed to show integration with various MS products. We tried to keep Microsoft happy, while at the same time trying to figure out if we were being bullshitted. Finally the manager at the customer told us that Microsoft was full of shit, he was booting them out, and told us not to worry about Microsoft integration. We visited the MS offices to tell the guy what a f____r he was, at which time he bribed me with Active Directory CDs and docs, and a copy of Site Server. I found this quite hilarious, because two months earlier, at a different customer in Chicago, the MS engineer there had bribed me with a copy of Site Server after I caught him in a lie.

June 2001: Steve Ballmer of Microsnot said that he and Bill noticed the backlash agains them during their anti-monopoly trial.  They perceived that the industry as a whole was not rallying to their defense.  They thought their operations had been "pro-competitive," but after the trial they decided they needed to play nicer with everybody.  Well, NO SHIT, Steve.  You guys have operated that hellhole like back-stabbing scumbags.  Announcing products that you never put out, to freeze the market in case you ever DID put out those products, instructing your salespeople to tell other vendors at joint accounts that they had to do all their business through YOU, telling prospects that MS could do anything at all they needed, and that no other vendors were necessary, and in general acting in total arrogance.  Yeah, I'd say that there was precious little sympathy for you guys.

Microsoft certification is a joke. It’s all just memorization. There’s no process, no nothing, just memorizing settings in config files.

I can almost see doing business with people who show up in their company "uniform," which for engineers is usually a nice button-down shirt with their company's logo on the pocket and their URL across the back. But more and more that company uniform is a pair of pants that doesn't fit, a belt that's too long, and some kind of sports shirt. "Hey, it's got a collar," I hear. But they're SLOBS. It indicates a lack of respect for the people you're visiting, and a slouchy sort of mentality. I'm all in favor of casual. But when you're visiting a client, especially if you're partnering with another vendor going in, don't dress like your wife's Uncle Lou heading out for a night of bowling.

Netscape guys are a prime example. Microsoft is close behind. In their case, given their history and size, looking like bus station bums comes off as supreme arrogance.

When I was in the object-oriented database market, I had a prospective client in Naperville, Illinois, who dragged all the vendors through a nasty process of proving themselves.  They wanted to build a proxy server with an OO database.  They asked the competing vendors to actually write a proxy server with their respective database products.  Then they picked nobody, since now they had the skeleton of a proxy server.  They threw some bogus database in behind it.  These kinds of companies are what we call users, not in the typical sense of the word, but in the sense that they use other companies is a sleazy manner.

This same organization tried to impress vendors by showing them

• their kitchen, fully stocked with pizza, Snapple, and other free goodies to entice engineers into staying late or in-for-lunch
• their nearly empty second floor, filled with empty cubicles, which they said they'd be filling with all the engineers they'd be hiring in the coming year
• their staff of ponytailed, earring- and sandal-wearing, byte-slinging geeks who only recently had gotten dates because of the money they'd made on their IPO
• their absolute disdain for anyone who wasn't them

Speaking of the industry-standard ponytail/earring stereotype, my last company did a seminar series with a major industry player, and I happened to help at the first seminar in Chicago.  The other guys (okay, fine, it was pre-iPlanet Netscape) sent a former marketing type who'd turned semi-engineer.  He wore ripped jeans, horn-rimmed glasses, an earring, and a company sports shirt.  He was obviously trying too hard to fit the west coast mold, and came off looking contemptuous instead.  Our folks had suits on, and could actually run their products.  When his product skipped a beat during his presentation, he couldn't recover.

Netscum

I got to know Netscape very well when I worked for a company whose software the Netscape guys were licensed to resell. I got to HATE the Netscape guys very much when I saw how they operated. Here's what they did:

• They commonly resold our stuff below their allotted discount rate. We let it slide a few times, but on occasion, I had the pleasure of telling their reps, "You guys get to make up the difference."
• They sold our stuff without telling us, and didn't bother passing on the purchase orders. We regularly had to audit them to find the missing sales.
• If they heard that we had a deal going, they'd jump in, and undercut us, which was not our agreement. They'd wait until we had done the evangelical work, then come in at the last second and scoop up the sale. At the headquarters for a huge fast food chain, they pulled this little stunt, and when they needed our help deploying, I made them cough up a few thousand for our services.
• When I PERSONALLY convinced my company's CEO to sever the relationship, Netscape immediately, that very day, started telling all our prospects that they'd been responsible for 90% of our sales, and t hat we would tank without them. They were actually good for about 5%, and the amount that they scammed us on more than made up for it.

At the last gig, Ed and I were visible.  One of the ways we got very visible was by selling.  We sold a lotta software there.  Another way we became visible was via sales announcements.  One day, one of the sales managers at corporate sent out an excrutiating company-wide email touting a sale by one of her reps.  The email was filled with exclamation points and ass-kissing agony.  The sales community, a bunch of tongue-waggers as at any other place, started calling each other, being annoyed with a string of such announcements.  Ed asked me if I could do something to shut her up.  I proceeded to compose the Big Mama of all sales announcements for one of our guys in Texas, who'd sold a measly four grand worth of stuff.  Then we had a few legitimately large sales, and my sales announcements became rather grandiose, and full of the kind of crap seen here on my site.  They were largely well-received as the witty and insightful pieces that they truly were.

But there were a handful of malcontents who found offense in the most mundane of jokes.  They found them racist, sexist, xenophobic (Ed, the x is pronounced like a z ), and everything-else-phobic.  I told them all to go to hell.  When I sent out the email telling everybody Ed and I were splitting, I received over fifty emails back, mostly saying they were sorry we were leaving, and regretting that they'd get no more interesting sales announcements.  I actually had gotten an award at the last sales training for writing those suckers. Hopefully I'll get the chance at my new place to offend people by announcing large sales.  Or by making rude noises in the bathtub.

For years, "Flip" Filipowski dumped all over Computer Associates, exorting his apostles at Platinum with the phrase (reprinted on lit and tee shirts for sales kickoffs) "Friends don't let friends buy from CA." And sure enough, while Flip looked like a genius for years at snatching up companies and turning a profit, CA carried the baggage of a reputation for devouring and ripping the hearts out of smaller companies (remember Ingres?).

So now comes the Rest of the Story. Having bungled the takeover of MemCo and driven Platinum's stock price into a spin, Flip ended up turning over his pride and joy to Sanjay Kumar of CA, who waited until the price was right. Since I have a number of friends who formerly toiled at Platinum, I can see their despair at their Santa Claus of a boss giving into the dark side, for filthy lucre. It's tough on the troops when you tell them it's religion, and then you show that it really was only commerce, all along.  And then in mid-2000, Flip was at it again, with Divine Interventures, which is not doing well.  He brought the same bunch of nitwits who helped him build Platinum into a house of cards, and they replicated their fine efforts at the new joint.  Tsk, tsk.  Their IPO was ill-advised, with Flip not only changing venture capitalists toward the end of the process, but having to reissue the prospectus more than once, because Flip kept dropping private info at parties, and that's a no-no.  First day out, they dropped two bucks, and settled for $128 million instead of $425 million.  He never really did it right the first time, and he screwed it up the second time as well.

As predicted in this space in early 2000, Flip totally blew it. Not that it took a whole lot of brains to see that he would.
 

Instead of "browser," call it "snoozer"

I really kinda sorta used to like Firefox, but the damn thing blows up all the f___g time. I don't know if it's memory management problems or WHAT, but it constantly freezes and I have to kill it in Task Manager. And even doing THAT can be a pain in the ass, because Windows sucks so bad as well.
 
 

TYPE it?  I can't goddamn READ it

There's a type of software used by Yahoo, various upload/download sites, and a whole bunch of other sites, for the purpose of thwarting spammers and others who mass-create accounts on public sites. To register and create an account or perform some other kind of transaction, you have to type in the characters found in an image, and the characters are usually scrambled in such a way that they can't be read by a bot. The problem IS, half the time even a human can't read the things. The characters get warped so heavily, or get lumped on top of each other, so that you can't tell what the hell it is. These shitheads should also disallow the use of O' and zeros, since you can't tell they apart when they're warped. It's a great idea, but often it's very poorly executed.

One of the worst offenders I've found is rapidshare, which I use to trade video performances of guitarists. You can't tell a C from a G half the time. When you guess wrong, it makes you wait all over again. Morons.
 
 

VMWare wears thin

This is stuff that runs like a virtual machine within your machine. Operating system, apps, everything. It's for demonstrating sofware. Take a snapshot of your demo app and demo data, bring it up for a demo, then rewind it so it's back in it original state for next time. So you can beat hell out of it, change anything you want, even break your demo, then put it back to the start for next time.

But you never know how it's going to run. Even if you reboot your entire box right before a demo, it might run like shit. Later on in the day, it might run like gangbusters. It also looooooves message boxes. So I did a demo one particular Monday, and I want to set up for the next one later in the day. I tell it to revert to its original state. It pops up a couple of messages. I hit okay. They're useless. In some cases, they're just "helpful hints." I checked it a little later, and oh shit, it hadn't finished rewinding, since it was waiting for me to click this useless OK button. FINALLY it looked like it was on its way. I even stood there for half a minute to make sure that was the last box. I came back a while later, and apparently this goddamn piece of shit had popped up yet ANOTHER message box, and so it never finished rewinding. Just do your f____g job already.
 
 
 

MySpace is TheirShit

I received some email asking my opinion of MySpace. Having never tried it, I had NO opinion, not even a correct one. So I figured I'd try it out. I went to their SignUp page to create an account. Filled out the online form, hit the button, and got the message "There was an error processing your request, please try again." Wow, what a helpful error message. Tried again. Same thing. Tried a different password. Tried a different email address. Tried a different EVERYTHING. Sent them email, asking what the hell. Never heard back. Tried a different browser. Tried a different machine. Tried a THIRD machine. Killed off all cookies and temp files. No go.

Went online, found all sorts of other people who've had the same problem. One girl said she'd tried for months.

If you're going to provide an error message, it would help to provide one that actually tells the user WHAT THE F**K THE PROBLEM IS, so they can fix it.

In their FAQ, there's a link for "Can't create an account." But all it tells you is to send them an email. Did that. Several times. After several days, no answer. So they fail on customer service as well. Rupert Murdoch actually owns them. So maybe the same dumbshits who run Fox "News" and actually have the nerve to CALL it news are the ones who run MySpace.

Another lovely example of how shitty this site is: I looked at the "Contact MySpace" link. Naturally, I'm not logged in, since these dickheads can't create my account. The Contact Request area has a pulldown box with the possible topics. I choose "Site Errors," so I can report there f**d up registration mess. If I choose this, it populates another box with choices for site errors. My choices are "Please select a sub-topic" and "Report Site Error." This is followed by a Submit button. So I can send them a useless message with no info other than "Site Error" and they have no idea who I am. What complete retard designed this shithole of a site?

In researching this, I also found a website by a guy who has been unable to get rid of his MySpace site, so he changed the graphics that his page links to, to show a photo of a nude guy. Full frontal. Then he reported himself, hoping MySpace would wipe him out. He asked visitors to his new site to report him as well. And yet it's still there. 
 

CONSULTANTS    major additions September 2007
 

I had to work with a smaller partner in the Chicago suburb of Itasca. One of their salesguys was given my number, and I helped him with a handful of questions from his latest prospect, a major credit card company. Then he asked if I would be available for a live onsite demo the following week. I said, sure. He told me he would nail down the date. Days went by, there was no update. I got a brief note as to a tentative date, and I ended up having to schedule another of my guys to do a gig in St. Louis so I could be available for the credit card guys. This idiot went completely dead on me. After another week and a half, I finally reached another person at his place. She emailed him, asking about the credit card gig. He responded to her immediately that the project was on hold. She forwarded that to me. I asked her rhetorically why the asshole couldn't have responded to ME after several voice mails and emails.
      My boss and I had lunch with that lady and another female from the partner a few weeks later. They wanted to work a different opportunity altogether, one of the airlines. I explained my problem with the previous salesguy, and they assured me that would never happen again. Well, I got them everything they needed, all the materials, resumes for some consultants, got some questions answered for them, then NOTHING. The new broad would not return a single f___g message, for more than a week. I went to the west coast for a trade show, and my CEO was on me everyday about the airline. I couldn't get any info from the partner. So I shit all over them. THEN I  ended up working through another, larger company on a number of opportunities, including the airline AND the credit card company. The partner came back to me, kissing my ass. Too late.
 

MarchFirst was what was left of a crappy consulting company to begin with, Whittman-Hart. They had actually gone public, then gobbled up US Web for way too much. Then the Internet bubble popped, and they choked. They were sold off in pieces, and what was left filed for bankruptcy. Arrogance, stupidity, and poor planning doomed them. Whittman-Hart was noted among most of us for one less than endearing habit: they'd come in, do their thing, document nothing, and always leave a mess behind. They didn't do much better as MarchFirst, where at two of my gigs, their people regularly broke things that the rest of us had to fix again. We used to joke, "Oh crap, here come the MarchFirst guys, it'll be a long day.," 

At a large joint customer, we all shuddered whenever the MarchFirst guys would touch anything. We'd get stuff working, then MarchFirst would break it, and we'd have to come fix it. After the fifth occurrence of this, we actually went to the customer and complained, and the MarchFirst guys were put on something else. When MarchFirst itself went belly up during the project, some of their guys tried to get full-time jobs at the customer, who called me and asked, "If you were us, would you hire them?"  To which I replied, "Not to clean my gutters."  They disappeared accordingly.
 

At a large manufacturing client in Indiana, we sit in on a vendor meeting. The CTO wants to go live with his project in two months. He's yet to buy the database, the application, the servers the routers, the ANYTHING. Why does he think he can pull this off, as in buy all the shit, test it, debug it, deploy it, from scratch, in two months? Because his resident consultant from (let's change the name to protect the idiotic) KGPM told him they could do that. "We know it's an aggressive timeline," the consultant says, "but we feel it can be done." I loudly tell them, in the midst of all these fine vendors (including the sleazy Oracle guys) that this is lunacy. We're the only ones who get anything out of the deal, as it turns out, because of our honesty.
 
 

Tens of thousands of employees, and no integrity to speak of

I literally walked a Big Five partner into a huge account of mine, an established customer. They'd crapped out previously, but I brought them back in, and finally they got hte consulting work. They proceeded to screw me, the customer, the sales guy, and even their own people as they greedily soaked the account for all it was worth. To protect their identity, I'll just call them Brice-Slaughterhouse. The list of their crimes goes on and on. Here's just a fun sampling:

• They were obligated to turn all training over to us, so they stopped calling it "training," and instead referred to it as "transfers of knowledge." But they used our materials, and billed it themselves, cheating US.
• They called endless design meetings, and would show up with up to 17 people, all of them billing for their time. After enough of these meetings, one of our guys whispered to the head lady, "How much did that last meeting cost you?" She FINALLY wised up and told the sleazebags that from now on, only essential personnel were needed at meetings.
• Things would blow up, and they would call us up on a Friday night and say "The customer is pretty pissed at you. You need to have somebody there first thing tomorrow." As in Saturday. I replied, more than once, "If the problem turns out to be your crap code, I will crucify you. Make SURE it's our stuff before you say this garbage. And if they're pissed at US, I want to hear it from them, not you." And we ended up making THEM fix it.
• They snuck a competitor of ours in the back door to take a piece of the business, and when we found out and asked, they LIED about it and said no such thing was happening. Over dinner in a Detroit suburb, with me practically screaming at them, they finally 'fessed up.
• We tried to get them some business at another customer, in Indiana. Their engineer came on a conference call and started raving about the product of ONE OF OUR COMPETITORS. I reamed them on that one. They smacked the engineer after I made noise, and offered finally to perform a free proof of concept for another of our products.
• And so on.

Now it gets dull  Jan 2002

At the airports, I see signs advertising for Accenture, the former Andersen Consulting.  The signs say "Chinese will be the number one language on the web by 2007.  Now it gets interesting."   Really?  Why is it interesting?  Accenture is laying people off.  Are they equipped to do Chinese on the web?  Nah.  It's was they could do to stay in business at the time.  They couldn't get along with their parent company.  I witnessed firsthand some old Andersen Consulting staff angrily escort Arthur people out of their lab on one occasion.  Now they're going to get along with Chinese webmasters?  Not likely.
 

I visit a large healthcare joint.  They like my stuff.  They have a large project.  We don't manage that stuff, so I recommend a Big Five outfit.  They say, not right now, we'll talk again about that part in two weeks, but maybe.  I call a Big Five project guy, tell him I need help writing a proposal, and in two weeks, I might be able to walk him in the door.  Next day, he calls the customer directly.  Customer calls me and SCREAMS, says I sicced a consultant on him.  I call Big Five guy and SCREAM.  We may eventually get the deal, but guaranteed, the Big Five guy won't.
 

I land a big deal in another country.  I bring in one of the Big Five to manage the deployment. $1.5 mil later, the customer has reams of analysis and system inventory, typical consulting fluff, but not even a working demo of a product which can typically be installed and demo'd in half a day.  In the meantime, thye've been expensing lots of costly meals AND trips to the strip club. They get loudly canned.
 

How to know there are consultants in the room just by listening:

• "I think of that as a business process, not an underlying technology."
• "The architecture looks good, so let's put it through a use case."
• "Yes, the timeline is aggressive, but we think we'll hit the core deliverables."
• "Ka-ching !"

Software vendor:  "I have a better idea.  Will it work?"
 

THE JOB MARKET
 

In '96 I interviewed with Progress Software for a sales engineering job.  The guy who interviewed me was pretty cool.  But I asked him to describe an average sales week or month.   He actually pulled out a schedule and went over with me how the crew was going to spend the coming year.  Training, regional meetings in Colorado, national meetings out west, more training, and so on.  I finally asked, "When the hell do you guys actually SELL stuff?"  I could picture missing my children grow up as I spent all my time in classes.  I passed.  The hiring manager went frigging NUTS.  He yelled, told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life, I'd never have another opportunity like this my whole life, etc.  A year later, I ran into colleagues of his on a ski slope in New Hampshire.  "Oh, __________ really must have wanted you for the position.  But yeah, he goes a little ballistic when he doesn't get his way."  None of those people I spoke with still worked for Progress; they'd moved on to other things where they could have a life.

I find it most annoying when I turn down a job and am told later by the person who tried to hire me, "You were smart not to take it.  Boy, were we ever messed up."

• This happened at Informix, where the model (selling into verticals) at the time was sloppy and prone to creating channel conflict.  Later, the guy who ran the office started his own consulting gig, and called me up, wanted to partner on some other stuff.  He told me horror stories about the local Informix office, stuff he knew was going on while he was trying  to hire me.  Thanks a lot, I told him.  Personally, when I've been in the middle of turmoil, I've always said, "This is a bad time to bring somebody on."

 
• I interviewed at a software house with a package that competed in the call center market.  The other field engineers in the office (all eleven of them) were non-tech types who'd ended up as "engineers."  Not a coder in the bunch.  I was informed that if I came on, I'd be the "technologist."  In other words, the only non-demo-dollie in the group.  I passed.  The hiring manager got pretty steamed.  Then a few months later he ended up at their biggest competitor, and when I called there to give a reference for somebody else, he reminded me of our earlier meetings, and told me, "Yeah, you didn't want to go there.  The comp plan stinks, and their technology is falling way behind."  Oh, gee, thanks a bunch.

 
• After one nearly-year-long consulting gig in '93,  I helped the crew finish off an exhausting, nasty conversion project.  We spent Super Bowl Sunday killing one system and switching to the next.  That night I was determined to do something else with myself.  They vaguely offered me the position I wanted, although it wasn't certain that the position would even be created.  I resigned, and the head guy cussed up and down, saying it had cost them $15,000 to a headhunter to bring me in.  I reminded them of the many 70-hour weeks I'd put in, and how I actually liked to see home occasionally.  A few months later, that ex-employer was a customer, he'd had his heart attack, and he told me, "You made a good decision, getting out of here."  He has since dumped the software biz, and works in construction with his brother.

 
• I interviewed at a testing-software company.  I told them outright, one of my hesitations was their well-deserved reputation as sleazy sellers.  The manager assured me this was a holdover from a trio of bad reps they'd gotten rid of three years earlier.  "The new guy we just hired in Canada said the exact same thing, and we convinced him otherwise.  Here, let's get him on the phone."  And so we did.  And I asked him about this reputation, and he said, "Oh, sure, these guy's will sell their grandmother to make a buck.  But the commissions are great, so what the hell."  Oops.

Early '99: I'm on the market again.  Actually, I'm pretty settled on where I've just ended up, but I'm still finishing a few loose ends. An ERP company called Pandesic putting business processes on the Web comes calling, via a headhunter who's put me at a previous job.  Their initial base salary offer is laughable.  The headhunter rationalizes this away by saying, "C'mon, Whiz, you're gonna make it up on the back end."  I say, SHOW ME, I haven't seen a comp package yet.  "The stock, it's gonna be killer," he says.  HOW DO YOU KNOW, I counter. 

Some kid who'd ended up as a regional manager told me, "Our CEO used to be at Intel, and he quit there to run our place, and he promises everybody we'll all be millionaires." I was told it was an informal interview, so I showed up in business casual, and then the idiot told the headhunter I obviously didn't take the opportunity seriously.

As of winter 2000, they still haven't gone public, and likely never will. Oops, and here it is late 2000, and they're GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.  Their web site is like a funeral parlor.
 

If not for the clients, this would be a pretty cool business
 

Face it, most customers are idiots, no matter what business you're in.  Customers in the software business, even though they're presumably educated, are presumptuous, demanding, lazy, and sometimes outright stupid.

Here's some of my own customers' favorite stupid tactics when selecting vendors:

They won't admit when they're totally stupid. I had a customer in Texas who claimed to know my product backwards and forwards, and actually helped bring it into the place.  But as much as claimed to know it, he DIDN'T.  He peppered support with endless idiotic calls about the most basic stuff.  We finally talked him into attending classes.  He took the basic and the advanced class.  And he apparently learned nothing, and kept calling support literally fifteen times a day with stupid stuff.  His boss finally figured this out, and canned him.

They think you are at their utter disposal. I'm asked to fly to Detroit by an auto-related outfit for a Wednesday afternoon meeting.  They say they'll call to confirm.  Days go by, we hear nothing, and nobody returns our calls, so we finally leave a message saying "If we don't hear anything, we're not coming." The day before, they finally email and say the meeting's been moved to 9 AM, meaning, we'll have to come in the night before.  Bullshit.  How late can we show up, cuz we're NOT coming for 9 AM. Okay, 10:30 will work.  Dandy.  I get up at 5, take a 7:50, and then we end up sitting through their budget meeting for the first forty-five minutes.  For THIS they wanted us to come in early?   Then their idiot consultant tells us, "We don't want a sales pitch.  We need processes, not product."  Well, dipshit, we sell software, so too bad.  We told them flat-out, don't EVER expect us to do this again.
 

They stink at logistics.  I fly to Dayton for a morning meeting and arrive a little early.  It's a large place.   I sign in with security, they call up to my contact, get voice mail.  I try the guy's cell phone.  We leave messages, no biggie.  After ten minutes, we try again.  I pull out my book, start calling other people.  Can't get anybody.  After half an hour, I'm ready to LEAVE.  I page the guy's boss, I call people at random. After 35 minutes, I get a page.  I call back.  It's my contact. 

          "Where are you?" he asks. 

          "In your frigging lobby, where are YOU?"

          "Waiting for you in the conference  room."

     "Really?  How the hell am I  supposed to get through security if you don't sign me in?" 

          "Oh.  Yeah, I guess that 's a problem.  Why didn't you call?"

     "I called your desk.  Since you're in the conference room, you didn't get the call, right?"

     "Oh, yeah. that's right."

          " I tried your mobile, too." 

          "Oh yeah, I turn it off when I'm in meetings..... you should have asked them to check the conference rooms."

     "Uh-huh.  The building is 25 stories high.  I bet you have 100 conference rooms." 

          "That's true."

This is a VP, by the way.
 

Logistics Part II.  I go to visit a client at the IBM building in downtown Chicago.  Gal tells me, meet me on one floor, go to reception and get a badge, then they'll let you up to the other floor.  At reception, there's a locked glass door, and when I wave to the receptionist, she won't let me in.  She points to the phone in the hall.  Grrrr.  Some reception.  You have to know somebody just to GET to reception.  I call my contact, who's now gone from her desk.  Some people are coming out, so I enter through the open door, ask reception for a badge.  They call my contact, who's now back at her desk.   Receptionist  signs me in, tells contact to meet me on other floor, she's sending me right up.  So I  thank her for nothing, and hit the elevator.  I get to the next floor, and nobody's waiting for me.  I pick up the hall phone, dial her extension.  Hey, I'm on your floor now.  "Oh.  Are you?  I'll come meet you."  Yeah, sorta like the receptionist TOLD you to, only a minute ago. 
 

They have no freaking idea what they're doing, and are too arrogant to know that.  A large customer in a rural location calls us in, for a meeting with their IT department and ten other vendors.  They want all the vendors in the same room at the same time, so we can hash out any issues which might come up.  In the confines of a two-hour meeting, we vendors are supposed to figure out between us if there are any technical conflicts between our products.  Everybody just sorta nods and smiles and they don't find any conflicts.  Naturally, I find a few, so I look like the bad guy.  Then I start drilling down, and I ask, "What exactly is the timeline here?"  The customer wants to go live in ONE MONTH.  They haven't fully evaluated or bought a single product, but they intend to purchase, bring in house, install, test, and go live with Unix boxes, routers, proxy servers, web servers, multiple databases, multiple application servers, firewalls, and security tools.  "One month?"  I ask.  "If you had all that installed TODAY, I would take that one month just to TEST all that crap."  They smugly guarantee they can do it.  The other vendors smile along with them, not wanting to be difficult.  Even when the project leaders leave the country for an investor road show, they still hold to the one month figure.  Three months later, they're still deploying, and blaming the vendors for their failure.

They're more disorganized than YOU are. The customer asks me to come in to install a product for a pilot.  I ask the week before for directions to the lab  (they own literally fifteen buildings in their home city).  I also ask what kind of box they've got (Unix, NT, Win2000), what kind of application I'll be working with, who the contacts are, etc.  Two days to go, I still don't have that info.  The day before, I leave one guy an urgent message, and he has a different guy call me.  That guy leaves me a voice mail, says "Sorry to miss you, I'm leaving for the day in five minutes, call me right away."  And of course I was on another call.  I flew in anyway.  Called all my contact numbers, finally reach someone who says "Come to Building Number Three, downtown."   I get there, and wait around for somebody to come out to the lobby to get me into the lab.  I leave more messages. Finally somebody walks by who knows me.  He sends me to another building, far in the northern suburbs.  We have a brief meeting, then back to the first building, downtown.  By the time I start installing, it's after 4 PM, and I've lost the first day.

They don't listen worth a shit.  I sell a web product, call it FooTastic.  A customer in Indiana wants to use FooTastic in conjunction with their app dev tool, call it WebCrap.  Customer asks how they work together.  Great, I tell them, just turn off Option Number Ten in WebCrap, move one of the files out of the WebCrap directory, and you're done.  One business day later, Customer emails me and says they've turned ON Option Number Ten in WebCrap, and they're getting errors.  I email them back, reminding them, "Please review my earlier mails in which I tell you to turn OFF Option Number Ten." They write back again, saying, "Yes, we read those mails and thought that might be the problem."  Argh.

They stick you in a lab with virtually no room and no facilities.  Many times I've had to work in a cramped space, where you have to either stand up or at least suck in your chair if somebody needs to move.  And often there's no phone.  So God forbid you need support.  Support will say "Now type the following," and you have to put the phone down, run back into the lab and type it, note the response, then run back to the phone.  OR you have to use your cell phone, and the reception is always bad inside a cramped space filled with equipment and air conditioners and idiot customers.

Being totally unprepared for an installation.You tell them  you're coming in to install software, they schedule time, they get you a lab space, everybody knows a week or two in advance you'll be there.  You tell them, have the web server or database installed for when I get there, and I'll put my stuff on top of it.  So I show up, there's no web server, there's no database, and hell, they haven't even cleared the visit with the head of the lab, so now they've got to scramble to find the key to the lab, get you logged onto a machine, the other people there working on other projects resent you because you're in their space, and they can't find the guy with the admin password.  Hey, shitheads, you've only known for fourteen days I'm coming, and the day I show up you start getting ready?  Hello?

Being totally unprepared for an installation Part II. Yo Once again, customer knows I'm coming for a couple of weeks.  Have a box, have an admin password, have a DBA handy. No sweat.  I show up, and the box has a product installed on it which locks up the registry, meaning you can't install anything else on it without the key.  Who has the key?  The guy who's on vacation.  Failing to get the key, we REINSTALL THE OPERATING SYSTEM.  And lose more than half the day.

They go through a rigorous evaluation, you and your main competitor are the two left standing, and at the last second, after all the eval work and answring of questions and filling out of questionnaires, on the second to last day they pop up with another vendor, and ask how you stack up against THAT guy.  You say, "Huh?  Who the hell is THAT?  Didn't I answer all the questions?"

They compare apples and oranges. The wrong people are often put in a position to select products, and they don't understand the differences between those products.  Somebody will ask a bunch of questions from a piece of paper, and you answer them, and they nod and smile and say "Yeah, okay," and when it's all over, you realize they have no freaking idea what the hell you're talking about.  So you need to ask, "Um, can I talk to the guy who WROTE all that shit on your piece of paper?"

You bust your balls answering all the questions, making them look good for their bosses (who expect a thorough evaluation), you spend a lotta money on plane tickets and hotel rooms, and when it's all done, you win the deal, but they "only want a few evaluation licenses at this time."  In other words, not enough to cover your expenses.  When they call with problems, you don't call back in a hurry.

They waste everybody's time, yours and theirs.   I had the misfortune to deal with the IT folks at Montgomery Wards a couple of times.  They wanted all their vendors to bend over backwards for next to no  money.  Monty Wards ran a horribly inefficient mess, they'd spend months on projects, evaluating products that they never ended up buying, wasting  their own time as well as that of their vendors, which prompted several vendors to tell them, "If you're not going to buy this time, I'm not bothering," and this screwed them on future purchases. 

Side Note on Wards: Their IT department was decorated with stained carpets and ancient, shredded fabric cubicles.  They'd bought some craft show  wooden letters to spell out INFO SYSTEMS and glued them to a piece of wallpaper, then when they replaced the wallpaper, they wanted to  preserve the letters.  So they cut out that piece of wallpaper with the letters on it, and hung the whole thing up on the new wallpaper, whose  dark, dingy color contrasted with the ugly, bright new wallpaper. 

They waste everybody's time Part II. I was part of a team making a pitch to KMart.  It was, we like you, we don't like you, come in and do an eval, do a second eval, drop your price by half, it looks good, oh wait IBM will give it to us for free, give us a proposal, can you do another eval ..... And so they wasted a fortune doing evals and having meetings, and examining materials, and many months later, they'd purchased nothing, deployed nothing for their project, and then they went bankrupt.  The project was meant to save them lots of money, but they not only wasted money, they wasted opportunity.