Blue GNU has an interesting testimony on Microsoft Sales Tactics, a a conversation between two IT management types.
Both parties explicitly stated their belief that Microsoft’s sales people were attempting to oversell the company – intentionally.
Which is exactly my impression. Microsoft does not build software. At least, Microsoft campus – or wherever they try to make good software nowadays – is in the country far, far away. In a figure of speech to some, but litteraly here in Belgium.
Microsoft Belgium is a sales & marketing company.
Heck, they don’t even have local support people here. (I can’t even testify, from my experience, whether Microsoft really delivers useable support.) Even where Microsoft has support people, they are in a building far, far way.
But I digress. My point is, as all geeks now, it stinks when all you have is sales.
One Comment
Correction: Microsoft does have a support engineer in belgium. Not regular first line support but escalation engineers.
First line is usually in some low cost country that happens to be somewhat near your time zone.
You just have to try to get your call escalated to someone who knows what he’s talking about and then you’ll get europe based support