[Animats]

No. That's not how sales organizations for competent companies work.

IBM, in the mainframe era, was very good at this. It was IBM policy that if you called anyone within IBM sales with a problem, it was the IBM employee's job to get you to the right people. All IBM salespeople had a little printed pocket book of phone numbers within IBM, a directory of contacts for various types of problems.

[mikestew]

Man, I can't upvote this enough. Say what you will about the IBM of old or new, when you called you didn't have to put up with this runaround of putting the onus on the potential customer. "Hi, IBM, I'd like to give you money." "Just a moment, sir, and the next person you speak with will be the one that can help you."

"Hi, Microsoft, I'd like to give you money but fuck me if I can figure out which SKU or how much." "You did it wrong, sir. You should have called this other number. Or you should have Googled it. But the last thing you should have done is called me, have a nice day. <click>"

I ran into this almost ten years ago trying to price the various SKUs we needed for Visual Studio. It was appallingly ridiculous how much time I spent on that, in contrast to just going to a web page, comparing features, click a few radio buttons, click "Buy", sorted. It was the last place I've worked since that I've had to beg Microsoft to take my money. Now they just plain don't get my money.

Signed, A very disappointed ex-MSFT employee and ex-shareholder

[protomyth]

IBM is still like that. I called with an issue on an old iSeries machine[1] and mentioned that I might want to purchase a new one[2]. I got no less that 3 calls within 4 hours asking me about my purchasing needs and giving me exact prices and plans. They would be fine with taking my money.

1) I guess if the switch its connected to gets reset, the older version of the OS cannot reconnect automatically.

2) accounting software will make you buy strange things

[tracker1]

I remember a friend of mine's company bought a $78k storage server around 1998, and one of the drives failed 4 months in, he called just to replace the drive and it took a call from the upstream vendor to get them to not try to sell them another >$70k storage server.

[hackuser]

For the record, that hasn't been my experience with IBM; I used to get a pretty bad runaround, but perhaps that's changed - I stopped using their products as a result.

[khedoros]

I took "mainframe era" to be roughly the 50s through 70s or 80s. Are you talking about the same time period?

[hackuser]

No, I guess I'm talking about the post-mainframe era; perhaps the PC era.