On Apr 13, 2005, at 1:53 PM, Mark D. Rodriguez wrote:

...They could have
solved this problem on day one if they would have taken 5 minutes to
send me an email with the program and the 3 commands I needed to run,
but instead IBM must have wasted 50 or 60 man hours discussing it, have
conference calls, pushing responsibility around, deciding who would pay
for it, ...

Been there. IBM has an absolutely bizarre economics thought process. In
upgrading 3590 drives from model B to E, they shipped a pallet full of
parts to customer sites and had at least one CE spend a whole day at
the customer site replacing just about every part inside the drive -
and then had to return several more times to fix problems resulting
from the organs transplant, with attendant customer dissatisfaction.
The logical way to approach the upgrade was to ship tested 3590E drives
to enterprise customer sites and spend an hour sliding out the old ones
and sliding in the new ones, with the old ones being shipped back for
thorough remanufacture. However, rigid procedures rather than logic
pervades too much of IBM.

  Richard Sims