You'd think that makers of things would try to make life easy for the sellers of things, because selling the things you've spent money making is usually the path to happy accountants and shareholders.
After 20 years flogging IT, for vendors, outsourcers and bog standard resellers, I can happily state that HPE are, without question, currently the worst. If they were ever in possession of a clue, it seems ol' Meg threw it overboard years ago.
HPE Great Success Steps, as experienced last week by a colleague
1) Quotes HPE flashylightbox to customer. HPE are engaged and say add further 10% discount because important customer.
2) Customer changes spec by removing a minor bit of hardware, thus causing a new price for flashylightbox, HPE say same extra discount.
3) Somewhere, deep in the bowels of HPE, an elderly ProLiant staggers into life, blows the dust off it's dual 750Mhz, and promptly applies a series of random numbers to the discount on the portal. Then, for good measure, it makes the number a negative.
4) Colleague, concerned that the price of flashylightboxes should at least be a positive number, contacts HPE to query this.
5) Inevitable cc the whole of HPE email chain occurs. Like flies, Veeps appear from nowhere to prove importance by writing things like "team, please action this ASAP".
6) Global Veep of Shiny Teeth and Enamelled Suit in the US has a total brain fart and drops numerous passive aggressive email nukes on my fellow salestard;
"you should appreciate HPE are working hard as a team to project a consist message to the customer, you need to be part of the team. Get onboard"
Replies of "Please confirm that you want to charge minus sixty thousand quid for your tin" evoked even more passive aggressive Veepiness.
So we're not selling HPE now. Although, applying HPE logic, losing a negative sale would be a positive revenue situation.
Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of HPE, a ProLiant shudders back into standby, and resumes dreaming of electric Megs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
