Old School Corporate Software Scam

After my office recently received the third new release of some business software in a couple of weeks, I remembered how it went at **** ****. 

In the mid-90s, I worked at a large and now defunct software company that made software named after well-known Latin dances.

Right before a new product hit the shelves or any customers had seen it, the first PTF (programmatic temporary fix) patches would be posted. We fixed the bugs we missed or didn't have time to tackle before we "went gold." First we fixed "known failures," bugs we knew about, and shipped with anyway. We ranked that list according to how users would howl when they were victims of the unexpected behavior. Fortune 500 firm's failures were escalated even further up the priority list).

At **** ****, we never called software errors bugs. They were failures. This was to remind us that we had failed our customer. Mostly, we failed the customer in order to book revenue for the quarter

Once the software was deployed "in the field," the bugs really started rolling in. We created new patches every day. These were collected every week into a cumulative PTF. Once a month, cumulative PTFs were collected into a "TMP" release, and once a quarter, all the TMPs were released as an "update."

The best part was that we received something like $250 per year per seat (many hundreds of thousands of dollars for some companies) to fix all the bugs we put in in the first place.

After a year or so, we tossed all the fixes in with some new features and then charged for an "upgrade." Is this a great country, or what? /jack

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