[salmo]

I completely get this. I feel like every product I’ve had outside of a vendor’s wheelhouse has gone that way. We just use the BigIP gear from F5 and they’re better than the load balancers we used in the past. Thank god Cisco just abandoned that business.

I can’t imagine them supporting telco gear. The IPv6 thing has me LOLing because I just had a similar experience with a vendor where we don’t route IPv6 in that segment and even if we did, it shouldn’t break. Similarly, a vendor in a space they don’t belong that I imagine we bought because of a golf game.

A thing I dread is a product we’ve adopted being acquired… and worse, being acquired by someone extending their brand into a new area. It’s also why we often choose a big brand over a superior product. It’s not the issue of today, but when they get bought and by who. I hate that so much and not my decision, but it’s a reality.

It’s also a terrible sign if you’re dealing with a real bug and you’re stuck with a sales engineer and can’t get a product engineer directly involved.

I have a list of “thou shalt not” companies as well, and some may be similar where a few bad experiences ruined the brand for me. Some we’re still stuck with and I maaaay be looking for ways to kill that.

[Bagged2347]

> I have a list of “thou shalt not” companies

Can you share that list?

[salmo]

First, I don’t make these decisions but sometimes have influence. These opinions are my own and not my intentionally unnamed employer, and might be flat out wrong. This list is very focused on big companies at stupid scale with a lot of legacy… applied tech.

Generally my rule is “except for their very core product.” But this is full “hate everything” that pops into my mind:

RedHat won’t accept gifted patches for critical bugs in their tools that they won’t troubleshoot themselves. Getting the patch upstream means you get to use it in the next major version years later. That predates IBM. I won’t use their distribution specific tooling anymore. Outside the OS sucks worse. If I hear ActiveMQ one more time… [caveat: I probably hate every commercial Linux distro and Windows because my nonexistent beard is grayer than my age]

IBM… kind of feel sad about it, but they now suck at everything.

Oracle has good support, but they’re predatory and require an army of humans to manage inherently hodgepodge systems. Also creates an organizational unit of certified admins that can’t transition to alternatives because they’ve only memorized the product. Cisco’s the same except the predatory part and without many good alternatives for core DC gear.

CA, Symantec were awful pre-Broadcom and even worse now that they’re Broadcom’s annuity. Where products go to die.

Trellix (ex McAffee) is like the new Symantec or something.

There’s more I wish I could list for you, but can’t for various reasons.

On the other end, Satya has made MS a reasonable choice in so many things. Still a lot that sucks or is immature, but still… I didn’t think that was possible. I had to shift my mindset.