Windows 8

[Rustyv]

I really don't miss my voice and CTI days. The not-our-problem hot potato dance was a royal pain in my ass for 5 years. Hell I've been on both sides of it (vendor support and client engineering). I've got more stories than I care to remember about big telcos, Uncle JimBob's Bait, Tackle, and ISDN size telcos, 3 or 4 PBX vendors, and gawd knows who else that work in that market.

Little things, big things, huge things (like running all of the primary and backup OC192 circuits into a good sized Midwestern city in the same trench), and everything else you could think of.

Now I manage vertical real estate and do structural design and project management. Very different, but still very much the same. Just no 3AM patch installs anymore

[mekender]

Yes... and when you certify that a particular revision of Linux will run, and it won't, then MS and RedHat just toss it back and forth between each other.

And of course, getting third parties to certify that their application will properly run on a Hyper-V VM... And again, when there IS a problem, MS and the vendor play badminton with the problem.

Just like AOL and PC makers did for a decade during the dial up era?

Just like Road Runner does with PC makers now?

Just like Linksys does with Netgear?

Just like home alarm companies do with ISPs?

Etc...

All I know is that there was ONE time in my year of support where the answer to the problem was "we are not going to support that". That was a case where someone running a 2003 (no SP) server was getting an error code when he ran a backup. After searching through the source code for the error code for 3 days... Started on Friday night, stopped the search on Monday morning, we still did not find that code or where it was coming from. At that point it was a business decision that he had likely found a bug but it was in a 9 year old OS and it was one that no one had EVER reported before (even google searches for the error came up with nothing), so the likelihood of MS spending money to put developers on fixing that problem was zero.

Now, there were several situations where the customer was trying to do something that the product was not designed for, obviously that is not supported. For example running SQL off of a snapshot.

I NEVER once had a situation where a customer wanted me to stay on the phone with them and third party vendors and I refused (every email I sent to a customer had my supervisor's info at the bottom so you can bet I would have heard about it)... I did it all the time in fact... Got to know several people at IBM, EMC, NetApp, HP, etc... BUT I would be sure to make it clear if it was a situation where I would be sitting on the phone and not contributing to the solution and in doing so, they would still be spending support hours on their contract. Anything less would have been unethical.