Re: [Thinkpad] Customer care is not just a warranty (was T40...)

At 12:08 AM 03/17/2004 -0700, Deanna Berman wrote:

>No mixup on my part. I did not assert the existence of any warranty
rights; nor use the term "warranty" at all.
>
>Of course IBM has every right not to help someone with Win95 or Red Hat --
but those are not listed as supported operating systems,
>so I would not expect IBM to assist me with them. (I do note, though, that
in addition that for the "supported" operating systems,
>IBM does have a page of tips for installing Red Hat on a T40, with
disclaimers I consider perfectly appropriate.) However, I don't
>read "supported" as meaning merely "compatible with" or "meets the minimum
requirements to run". Used by a manufacturer with a
>history as formidable as IBM's, "support" is a word of art -- and IBM
knows damn well when, where and how to put it in writing.
>

I'm still coming down on Deanna's side here, Scott. If IBM says it's
supported, I expect them to make it work.

In a former life, I was the desktop and mobile hardware product manager for
a Fortune 500 company. Like many companies, we built our own customized
preload. You can bet money that if IBM said a model supported a particular
OS and didn't tell me there was an issue it had better work in my shop
using that OS regardless of which one came on the factory preload. If it
didn't, it didn't get deployed. If after it got rolled out a manufacturing
change was made and it didn't work any more and they didn't tell me about
it, IBM would have been eating them.

That would not have been an idle threat. One of IBM's competitors
slipstreamed a motherboard change in after we had tested it in our lab and
just before a large deployment to one of our business division's sales
force. That change caused an intermittent problem with network drops.
There's a very long story here involving normal break/fix procedures
gradually escalating to screaming matches with their hardware engineers and
sales managers, but I'll keep it short.

The manufacturer ended up:

1) taking back 200+ systems that had already been deployed (which were
replaced by ThinkPads)
2) losing the sale for the remaining 400+ systems and
3) paying for site-visits in multiple locations in multiple states to swap
out systems (remove the hard drive and put it into a new system with a
compatible motherboard) for an additional 200+ systems for a separate
business unit that decided they really wanted the model they had picked
(they hated ThinkPads, go figure)

I didn't take being lied to very well.

Jane
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Received on Wed Mar 17 09:26:48 2004