Support Contracts (was Re: Paid Sun Patches)

Tue Feb 18 17:37:03 PST 2003

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 16:46:22 -0800 
Heather Stern <star at starshine.org> wrote:

> Whether that value is in vague, human terms like "Would your life suck
> if it weren't dealt with" - or cold hard cash like "N employees times
> T hours and normally cranking out D dollars worth of product/research
> except when they are down" - or something in between like playing
> weasel words about what really means "down" and what merely means
> "slow"...

Another hairy bit is that cost analysis is not constant over time.  A
down email system has one expense during normal production.  It has a
rather different expense when your sales staff are in the final stages
of negotiating a $20M contract.  That's a whole different value of
'2'...

> A problem which a friend of mine likes to refer to as a reminder to
> management, that 2 + 2 = 4, no matter who'd like it to be 3, or 5.

Or, paraphrasing, 2+2==5 for sufficiently large values of 2, and 2+2==3
for sufficiently small values of 2.  In percentage terms that's one heck
of a spread.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.