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On 12/10/06 22:45:10, Simon Waters wrote:
Neil Williams wrote: > On 12/10/06 17:02:25, Rob Beard wrote: >> though. There was one company (I can't recall their name) who just delt with Windows 2003. The guy I spoke to was friendly enough but said that they make money from Microsoft products because they go >> wrong. > > Nothing wrong with that - after all, if their customers can't see > the problem . . . . And that from a Pharmacist.... ;)
Many a time I recommend a customer to purchase an item over the counter instead of paying the fixed prescription fee. That benefits everyone, the taxpayer doesn't get billed for the medication, the customer gets a discount and the pharmacy makes a bigger profit on the sale than it could ever hope to achieve by supplying the item on prescription. Daft.
The secret is to pay people when the IT supplied works, and stop paying them when it doesn't.
Or have a system that is sufficiently reliable that you only have to pay them when it goes wrong and don't pay for the software.
Or pay them a fixed amount with agreed levels of performance, and so the less work they need to do, the better off they are, so it is in their interest to make it work as seamlessly as possible. Interestingly the Chinese use to have a similar approach to medicine.
Not sure what you're proposing for the creaky old NHS there, Simon!The basic problem with healthcare is that it truly is a bottomless pit. For every disease that is cured, another takes it's place - the reason is simple, we all die of something! (My pet theory: we are being killed off by our choice of fuel: oxygen or more precisely, oxygen radicals due to their effects on DNA repair. Forget replacing kerosene for aircraft, the real prize is finding a replacement for oxygen.)
This cuts both ways of course, one client who paid me on this basis hardly got any work out of me at all one year. On the other hand his computer system (at least the parts I was responsible for - OS and database) were available for 100% of Office hours during that year. They weren't unhappy, although I think they were wondering what their previous, and their other IT suppliers, were doing wrong.
:-) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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