[oblio]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/28/the-road-to-fogbug...

> Some of our customers still think we’re one of those big enterprise software companies where you call them up, negotiate with a salesperson for three months, and, on the last day of the fiscal quarter, force the salesperson to promise a long list of new features in exchange for a half-million dollar contract.

> That’s nice, but we don’t have salespeople and we’re not one of those vendors. Our customers are happy that our price point is low but not all of them quite understand the implications. They ask us to fly out to their headquarters to give a demo of the software to their development team. They send us long spreadsheets with lists of features and ask us to check off the features we support. They even send us RFPs (shudder). RFP stands for “Request for Proposal.” It’s a request by a large company for a custom proposal from a small company. The small company works on the 200 page laser-printed proposal like mad for three weeks and Fedexes it in great expense and at the last minute, where it gets put in the trash because the large company has their favorite vendor who takes them on a helicopter to Atlantic City on junkets involving blackjack and strippers, and who is going to get the contract no matter what, but someone in purchasing for some unexplained reason, maybe he’s bucking for a promotion is insisting that the proposal be opened up to “competitive bidding” and the small company has been chosen as a victim to write up a proposal that has no chance of being accepted just to make the process look a little bit less corrupt, and if you’re a small company, I would recommend that you don’t fall for it and don’t spend any time responding to RFPs unless it’s already understood that you’re going to get the contract.

Joel, if you're accidentally around, your archive is borked :-( The front page reading lists are broken and navigation is super hard to try to find some of the awesome old articles.