[HN Gopher] Go ahead, be rude. It will cost you $350k
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       Go ahead, be rude. It will cost you $350k
        
       Author : redbell
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2022-11-11 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | pvaldes wrote:
       | Reminds me this interesting history (in Spanish, but many people
       | here most probably will speak it) mostly about the experience of
       | being sued by Arduino, but also telling the secondary history of
       | how a big telecom lost all contracts to update to 4G in one
       | entire country.
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw_q1Hjkuxo
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | The first time I read the phrase "the customer is always right"
       | was a book about aluminum produced by the Alcoa company when I
       | was a kid.
       | 
       | When I parrot this phrase to most people today they tell me the
       | opposite is true, that any customer who isn't satisfied is an
       | asshole and is doing you a favor if they switch to the
       | competition.
       | 
       | I remember reading a business book in the early 2000s that said
       | as much and that you should be trying to fire your worst
       | customers. Around that time my stockbroker fired me as a customer
       | because I didn't trade enough and because when they invited me to
       | a presentation on annuities I asked why I shouldn't buy I bonds
       | from Treasury Direct.
       | 
       | My reply to that is that there's a fine line between getting rid
       | of your worst customers and getting rid of all your customers and
       | it strikes me as another demented example of wishful hinking in
       | "business as usual" like Best Buy's decision to stock a single
       | Sony mirrorless camera body but not stock a selection of lenses
       | to use with it.
        
       | LinuxBender wrote:
       | I have some anecdotal experience with this. I was at an Oracle
       | event representing my company that managed Oracle for a very
       | large number of customers. I met Larry. He treated me like I was
       | an insignificant and _why was I even talking to him_. I
       | considered that rude and highly dismissive. It became my goal to
       | get our customers away from Oracle to which I had some success.
       | Quite a few customers were able to move to MySQL which at the
       | time was becoming more stable, more acid compliant and faster. We
       | already had ridiculously fast hardware _at that time anyway, not
       | by today 's standards_. I would like to think it cost him at
       | least a few of his racing yachts.
        
         | genericone wrote:
         | Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned
        
         | jasmer wrote:
         | Larry has all sorts of questionable qualities, and there are
         | plenty of reasons to leave (or use) Oracle, but some person
         | being arbitrarily dismissive isn't really one of them. Unless
         | the dismissiveness was over something very material.
         | 
         | "I would like to think it cost him at least a few of his racing
         | yachts." - because the CEO/Director of a massive multinational
         | conglomerate with 100 000 employees didn't arbitrarily have
         | time for you?
         | 
         | Also - and this may have nothing to do with your experience -
         | but for some reason some people feel as though they have the
         | 'right' to other people's attention. The more influence people
         | have the more people come out of the woods with this.
         | 
         | I do not envy anyone with an iota of influence or popularity,
         | it's a constant stream of people demanding their focus, any one
         | of which may or may not interpret something some way, or even
         | take an actual real slight out of proportion. Also I find that
         | people are bad at interpreting the state of mind of others.
         | 
         | Of course it's probably a good thing to move away from Oracle
         | anyhow ...
        
       | wildrhythms wrote:
       | I worked in IT and was very thankful I had a manager that
       | wouldn't put up with any bullshit from customers. Any kind of
       | disrespect to the IT people would lead to the customer being
       | chewed out and banned from getting our help. The manager gave us
       | an open form to submit any such issues. We were encouraged to be
       | transparent with customers about the issues, if the problem was
       | out of our hands, what the delay is, etc. no bullshit. It made a
       | shitty job a little less shitty I guess.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-11 23:01 UTC)