Re: I always thought Microsoft would be the one to get them...
I used to work for a school that was taken over to become an academy.
In the process, they wanted to merge sites, ditch half the IT staff, etc. But not before they'd forced us into IT service agreements that would benefit the "superhead" and his golf-chums into perpetuity, by selling us everything from cabling and networking to software and hardware.
One of the products they wanted to push was LightApp (I believe it's dead now). They exhibited us at BETT using it, but actually we already vetoed it and refused to touch it. It was a thin-client solution based on pushing X-Windows sessions into thin-clients, and then replacing everything on the backend (i.e. the IT team) with a remote server managed by the company in some god-forsaken third-world country. We vetoed it on many grounds, everything from "no local support" to "we don't have an internet connection reliable enough" to "data protection issues" to "security issues". Bear in mind they wanted hundreds of students to use those thin-client / remote-sessions for EVERYTHING they did, plus all the school admin, etc. It was just laughable.
They allowed me to trial it as a pupil so that I could voice concerns and they could answer them. So I logged in via their thin-client, got full root access in a matter of seconds (no security at all, they just assumed you'd never look in their chmod 777'd folders for all the admin users), and left a document on their desktop detailing my objections.
One* of those was: They sucked out the icons from MS Office and used them as icons for OpenOffice/Libreoffice (I think it was OO at the time, I can't remember), with Word, Excel etc. as the names. Prima facie trademark infringement.
Needless to say, at the time it was the least of my worries, and the least of theirs trying to sell us such a junk piece of system, and they never saw a penny of it. I left soon after and I've never heard of them since.
(*) Best one, though, was that they promised us it would "run any Windows program". I don't think they knew that I was a Linux programmer and so could understand what garbage that was - at the time, WINE was barely viable for an old version of Office, let alone anything else, and virtual machines weren't heard of in Windows circles.
As part of this, we had "Ranger Suite" (since bought up by RM, so that's dead too), which is a Windows GPO deployment / user control program that shuts down rogue processes, forces the desktop settings, reports violations, allows screen-based remote control, etc. etc. and creates and manages users in AD. It was basically THE front-end security on a Windows machine. They said it would run under WINE and do everything it always did. I nearly died with laughter at the suggestion, and the salesman ran from the room and ran crying to the head saying I was being unprofessional. My boss then countered saying that the salesman is the one talking rubbish and didn't have an answer when proven that it would NEVER work (I doubt you could run that software now under WINE, it's so heavily AD/GPO/Registry/task-hook based), so nothing happened and we never saw him again.
Two weeks later, the guys in charge of trying to move us to this setup offered me £600 a day to go around their other schools and help them sell it, on the basis of "he's smart, but lots of money should be enough to let us use that smartness against our other clients", I think. As my boss correctly predicted I would tell them at the time, and how I re-iterated when asked, "there wasn't enough money in the world that would make me lie and con schools out of money for a living".
But it's funny that 15+ years later, people are still pulling the same tricks with no knowledge of how to do business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
