One Bad Apple Spoils Every Barrel

Being Your Own Worse Enemy...


I just had an interesting experience this noontime today.

I called the US office of a company based in France which builds a machine that I have the opportunity to support on an O&M basis, and much to my surprise...

THEY WON'T SELL ME PARTS FOR THEIR MACHINE.

Without "Permission."

Paraphrasing the conversation with the polite lady with the title of "Spare Parts Manager":

"We have to have a letter from the company that owns our machine telling us that you are authorized to work on on their machines else we can't even QUOTE YOU PRICES for spare parts."

[silence...heavy breathing]

(Taking a big breath here boss)

WTF?

I guess that now I have to remind everyone of the story of Apple Computer Corporation, the company that owned the "Personal Computer" market until 1982/1983 when IBM came on the scene.

You see, Apple's downfall and relegation to second tier status in the computer business...living a life as the machine favored by the "arty/farty, dope smoking, patchouli stinking hippy and sniveling, booger eating, tree hugger crowd"...was their insistence on clinging to a "closed" hardware/software system architecture where the only innovations and advancements came from within APPLE and their tightly controlled community of software developers.

IBM, on the other hand, virtually gave away their drawings of their computer and begged smart people to write programs and build expansion cards for their "open architecture."

Anyone but me ever buy a "QuadRAM board with extra serial I/O ports" to get a PC with a system clock with a battery back up?

And the end result?

There's a ZILLION IBM PC clones out there today built by companies with names from Acer to Zenith, and computer store isles are filled with software to support the machines based on the ancestry of the old Intel 8080 CPU chip.

Meanwhile Apple languishes in a small back corner area of those same stores, having recently resorted to building their own machines that can act like a "normal" APPLE Computer while at the same time imitating a "REAL" IBM PC clone machine in order to try to draw in a larger user base. (A business associate of mine bought one for about $4000 and absolutely hates it and nevers uses it in "APPLE" mode.)


Needless to say that these French Assholes haven't heard the last from me, because I already have pricing from regular industrial supply houses for a box full of o-rings and gaskets and for the time being I'll just make do without them...probably giving my customer a LOWER price in the process.

Free trade isn't FREE, but my money is as green as the next guy's/gal's and I have a LONG memory and little allegiance to anything without red/white/blue on the label.

Dammit...