This was a MicroAge computer store selling equipment in 1985-1987/8 when I was there.
We had no QA beyond burning in kit ourselves before giving to the customer. Everything was simply vendor-supported hardware and software.
In this case it was Novell hardware back when Novell ran on your PC and there was no such thing as a dedicated Novell server. Those came after the hardware I'm talking about.
The software was a point of sale system (the name of which I no longer remember) and had to be network aware. From memory it was so the software could push transactions to another PC.
Anyway when the sales guy approached me and asked if we could sell the system I said no. The vendors had made it clear that the mix of network card and software didn't work and wasn't supported. We learned the hard way when another customer (the guy's brother) started having problems when we expanded his network.
It turned out the network vendor (Gateway?) had upreved their cards and the new ones caused reboots when used with this point of sale software. We had to call the distributor and beg for some older version cards to make the brother's system stable.
So the sales guy hears this explanation and goes to the boss and asks for permission to sell the systems since "We can just request old cards." Boss asks me, I say no because we can't guarantee getting old cards and as stated everyone in my support chain have washed their hands of this combination.
But the customer is price sensitive, it works for his brother and he's saying sell me this or no sale. So the sales guy writes a quote anyway. He knows my boss will feel obligated to honor the quote, and he did, so we sold the system.
In the end the store owner was screwed by his investment partners but that's a story for another day.
Hopefully you understand now why I thought the sales guy should pay for the replacement.
This was a MicroAge computer store selling equipment in 1985-1987/8 when I was there.
We had no QA beyond burning in kit ourselves before giving to the customer. Everything was simply vendor-supported hardware and software.
In this case it was Novell hardware back when Novell ran on your PC and there was no such thing as a dedicated Novell server. Those came after the hardware I'm talking about.
The software was a point of sale system (the name of which I no longer remember) and had to be network aware. From memory it was so the software could push transactions to another PC.
Anyway when the sales guy approached me and asked if we could sell the system I said no. The vendors had made it clear that the mix of network card and software didn't work and wasn't supported. We learned the hard way when another customer (the guy's brother) started having problems when we expanded his network.
It turned out the network vendor (Gateway?) had upreved their cards and the new ones caused reboots when used with this point of sale software. We had to call the distributor and beg for some older version cards to make the brother's system stable.
So the sales guy hears this explanation and goes to the boss and asks for permission to sell the systems since "We can just request old cards." Boss asks me, I say no because we can't guarantee getting old cards and as stated everyone in my support chain have washed their hands of this combination.
But the customer is price sensitive, it works for his brother and he's saying sell me this or no sale. So the sales guy writes a quote anyway. He knows my boss will feel obligated to honor the quote, and he did, so we sold the system.
In the end the store owner was screwed by his investment partners but that's a story for another day.
Hopefully you understand now why I thought the sales guy should pay for the replacement.