Some time back SHARE folks got wind that IBM was scoring APARs as defects against owning organizations and dinging them accordingly. As customers we took great umbrage at that judgement, arguing with IBM management that APAR fixes--PTFs--serve to improve the product. Especially PTFs installed as preventative maintenance.
It's hard to know what actual impact we had, but we delivered the message loud and clear and seemed to get a sympathetic ear from the IBM managers who attend SHARE expressly to find out what customers think. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2017 7:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: SoftwareXcel Discontinued On Fri, 8 Sep 2017 10:22:38 +1000, Andrew Rowley wrote: > >The bigger problem is when an organization views customer problem >reports as something to be minimized (as opposed to actual problems). > That's what I call "the Microsoft QA metric": the MTB calls to support. I discovered this years ago when I emailed a colleague a JCL snippet containing such as: // BLKSIZE=6144 ... and he replied, "WTF 'BLKSIZEa44'?" He had, foolishly IMO, configured Word as his MS Exchange viewer. I surmise MSW ignored my MIME header, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit"; did a Bayesian analysis of the content; and presumed Quoted-printable. They get fewer service calls by assuming the MIME headers are wrong than by honoring them. Likewise an HP PostScript printer failed my text document that contained a quoted sample of PostScript code: Bayesian analysis said "PostScript", but the PostScript was invalid. DWIM is too often a misapplication of Postel's Robustness Principle. I need barely mention browsers' attempts to cover up HTML misconceptions such as <BR><BR><BR>. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
