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Here at Stanford we were enthusiastic about one of BD's new software
products, Attractors. It would be obviously useful to our ongoing
clinical trial... About 6 months ago, I went to BD to test the software
with some of our data (collected here, using our own software), and
it worked quite well.
About 2 weeks ago, a BD salesperson stopped by with a demo version,
trying to sell us on the software. We decided to go ahead and test it
on our data. Much to my surprise, it could not read our data files!
(It gave a generic file reading error, stating that the file was damaged
or not an FCS file.) I called up BD and spoke with one of the programmers.
I was informed that the decision had been made by "BD Sales" to modify the
FCS header reading portion of Attractors so as to only read FCS files
created by BD's software (i.e., HP-generated)! (The reasoning being,
apparently,that they didn't want people with Coulters to be able to use the
program.)
So much for our demo. And so much for the possibility that we will be
purchasing Attractors, since we don't generate data with BD software.
(Hey sales people at BD: do you know how many macintoshes there are
here at Stanford that could be using your software to analyze data? 50?
100?) And it also means that the market for Attractors is significantly
limited. Is this really good "Sales" policy?
In the open-computing environment that is the general trend of this
decade, this kind of decision is rather insulting to the user community.
Mario Roederer
(PS--the sale pricing on Attractors was also interesting: as quoted to
us, it is cheaper to buy a total of 6 copies than to buy 3. Go figure.)
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