Financial software - Money extraction
It's the mid 1990's and I have a customer using financial software for their payroll on a Unix system from a company that was selling their solution based on how cheap it was. The issue was not only was it cheap but also not very good. A major release was coming and my customer had invested heavily in getting the new release up and running and was literally banking on some of the new functionality. The new release is made available and the software vendor states that they will install for a small (Ah hem) premium, the price was astronomical and the customer said no - So the customer application team (1 guy) was tasked with the install and it did not go well, it seemed looking at what he had done to be very complex and he hit a wall on a strange error. We were asked to take a look, it was a very convoluted install and to be honest we could not make sense of it. So one of our coding guru's took a look and wrote a script to install the software, it worked ! It seemed to us the software company had a plan to extract a handsome premium for install services by having a stupidly complicated install instructions if customers attempted themselves. The software company was acquired by an outsourcing operation in the early 2000's, so I expect their legacy is no doubt thriving ..........
Biting the hand that feeds IT
