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Storage & Servers

May 29, 2003

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"We need to hold our vendors' feet to the fire and tell them we want longer upgrade cycles and better software."

A Lie's a Lie
While I can't fault your legal logic, I strongly disagree with your implicit ethical acceptance of someone's clear desire to go back on his or her word ("Career Coach: Dear Loophole Seeker," May 1, 2003). When someone signs a noncompete agreement, that person is freely contracting to give the employer something it wants (an agreement not to chase its customers or potential customers) in exchange for something the prospective employee wants (a job). If the person breaks the contract, he or she is a liar and a cheat, whether the action is legal or not.

Our society functions largely because we have some level of trust in each other. Part of this is imposed by the legal system, but a more important component of this trust is the expectation that the promises will be kept. When that trust is weakened, all sorts of problems creep into society.

My advice to "Looking for Loopholes": If you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror, do the right thing; if you don't want to be bound by a noncompete, don't sign one.

Karl Compton
CTO; Cierra Business Solutions

Hard Line On Software
Mike Lee absolutely gets it right when talking about Microsoft's software cycles in "Retirement Planning" (April 17, 2003.). One point he fails to mention, however, is that Microsoft pushes customers into an extremely short upgrade cycle because of its greed, and everyone who buys into this scheme helps the company stuff billions of dollars into the Redmond coffers. Any company that keeps growing in the billions while so many others are still in trouble deserves a second look.

Lee is right in saying that "No software lasts forever." That's true, except that some software, especially your operating system, should last longer than others. If Microsoft would spend more time developing stable software rather than avoiding the issue by using short upgrade cycles and pushing you into more buggy products, maybe it could be trusted more. As it stands, I'm scared to death when it comes to dealing with Microsoft products, especially the new ones. As a typical network admin, I tend to wait at least one service pack before giving a Microsoft product a second glance, especially when I see no immediate need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to have the latest "gadget" OS.

Instead of "Holding your vendors' feet to the fire if they've promised something but haven't delivered," we, the users, need to hold our vendors' feet to the fire and tell them what we want: longer upgrade cycles and better software.

Name and company
withheld by request

Paying It Forward
In regard to Rob Preston's column "How To Contain Spam" (May 15, 2003), I'm not the first person to propose this, but here's a simple, effective, voluntary approach to controlling spam: Have every user deposit a small amount of money, say $25, with his or her ISP in a kind of buffer account. When the user sends an e-mail, the ISP takes a nickel from the sender's account and puts it in escrow along with an ID for the e-mail. If the recipient deems the sender valid, he or she sends a waiver with the e-mail ID back to the sender's ISP, who then moves the nickel from escrow back to the sender's account.

You would need to set a deadline, say a month, for getting the waiver back, but in most cases the ISP would receive the waiver in minutes. If the user decided to close his or her account, that person would get back whatever money is in the buffer account.

The payoff is that the regular e-mail user would put up a small amount of money, almost all of which he or she would get back, while a spammer sending, say, a billion messages a month, would have to pay $50 million and would get back almost none of it.

The voluntary part would work this way: The end user would sign up for the service, and from then on his or her account would accept e-mail only from ISPs that agreed to the convention. No ISP would be compelled by law to join, though I think the marketplace would very quickly drive ISPs to participate.

Tom Ratcliffe
Writer
Company name and e-mail withheld by request

Top 4 Techaches
Ron Anderson, your luck is not the problem (see "Open Wide, This Won't Hurt a Bit" April 3, 2003). I frequently call vendors for tech support, and only two of them leave me feeling like I've been helped. Here are my top frustrations:

1. Super-long wait times. I've had to wait longer than an hour just to get to Tier 1 support.

2. Inexperienced Tier 1 support people with big IT egos. When a person talks to me like I'm an idiot or dismisses my problem if his or her limited knowledge can't solve it, that really gets under my skin.

3. Getting chewed out by Tier 2 support. It's always a great feeling when someone more knowledgeable than yourself berates you for being less knowledgeable.

4. No speaka English.

The list could go on and on. Thanks for hitting the nail on the head.

Chad Brogan
IT Assistant; Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel, P.C.
cbrogan@cbslawfirm.com

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