On Monday, December 10, 2001, at 11:57 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 09:54 AM 12/10/2001 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
... 6A buyer has little or no understanding of the product he or she is requesting or the commercial activity in which he or she is supposedly engaged. ... 6A buyer has no interest in the customer service offered with a product or rejects the manufacturer's offer to train employees in proper use of the product.
Suspicious? Those are simply *routine* in the telecom and computer businesses :-) You'd think that they'd find it suspicious of customers *did* read all the manuals, closely, in great detail. It's less common now after the dot-com crash than during the heat of tulip-bulb mania, but if customers really understood technology there'd be less need for data sales people to bring along systems engineers to wave their hands and tell them what to think, or for companies to hire lots of customer support people to explain how to reset the coffee-cup holders on PCs, or for trade rags and internet sites to keep hyping new trends.
Quite frankly if the products worked the way the manuals said, if the manuals were written by the engineers instead of marketing, and if vendors didn't routinely lie about their products, they wouldn't have to do all that either. -- "Remember, half-measures can be very effective if all you deal with are half-wits."--Chris Klein