Vendor Snakeoil
One of the coolest booth prizes at RSA had to be from an appliance builder that was having a draw for a free prototype appliance ($2000 value). Thinking this would be an awesome win, i quickly filled out the form and placed it in the fish bowl. That was the last I heard of this until yesterday. I came into the office and had a voicemail from last week. It went something like this (close approximation):
Hi Tyler, it's Ed ******** calling from MBX Systems. I just wanted to let you know that we drew your name for the RSA drawing and it would be great if you could give us a call back to go over the details.
Now at this point I'm rather excited... I've got plans for this win. I'm thinking ComputerDefense.org appliance installed in a rack somewhere instead of a hosted page for this blog. I call back and end up having to leave a voicemail. After a brief game of phone tag, I finally get Ed on the phone. He does some standard sales guy talk and then asks how he can meet my needs, and since I just want my free system that I won, I ask how it works. At this point I'm informed that someone else won the free prototype... I've won a free eval! W00T! Stop the presses... a FREE eval! Needless to say the phone call quickly ended.
This was, to date, the sneakiest trick I've seen to get someone on the phone. At this point I may not be directly involved in appliance purchasing but I'm a big fan of the vendor space and who knows where I'll be in 1, 5 or even 10 years. I do, however, know who I won't be doing business with.
You know, if I'd won and their systems were half as good as their marketing material claims, I probably would have written up a blog post praising them... at the very least they would have gotten positive mention just because I'd won it. Since I didn't win, they could not contacted me or gone with a standard sales call and I wouldn't have had anything bad to say about them, at least I'd know the name should I ever be in the position to purcahses appliances in the future. Instead they took this sleazy approach and now I'm going to always know who I'm not doing business with.