Erdos Had The Number First

I got a call today from a sales person at Red Hat that baffles me as to how they can survive as an organization.

And Maybe they can’t.

We have a basic subscription to Red Hat Workstation 3.0 that will expire in 30 days.
I got an email about this when it was at 60 days till expiration. He was calling me to let me know how to re-up my subscription. This is the second subscription we’ve had from them, the other being a Server subscription that we let lapse too.

We let both of them lapse because Red Hat made it clear when we were evaluating their software that we were not a big enough fish for them to care about. I mentioned that this was one of the principle reasons that we picked Mandrake instread of them. Mandrake went out of their way to let us know that, as a paying customer, we would get all the support they could offer.

The Red Hat person, who was the territory rep, proceeded to do several confusing things

1) He appologised and assured me that Red Hat felt all customers were OK
2) He pointed out that Red Hat is a small company
3) He noted that he only finds out a person has purchased RH software when they come up for renewal unless they buy it from him
4) He will only sell software to people if they want to spend more than $2000

The problems with all of this are huge, especially since this guy is the sales guy.
Answering a customers complaint with a denial is foolish. The fact that Red Hat is a small company has NO bearing on what’s being discussed. And besides, Red Hat has a $2 Billion market cap. That’s a small company?

The thing at slot 3 and 4 are the biggies, though. If RH wants to build and maintain sales it needs to do so with more than that. Territory managers should know about every copy of software that’s sold, that doesn’t mean they have to call them (especially if the sale goes through an ISV or a VAR), but they should contact them well before the renewal is upcomming.

This arrogant crap is the reason people start to hate vendors. Red Hat is on my “No” list now.