One reader noted a lesson in a complaint about Cisco not providing a customer with current software. "When it is in a vendor's interest to treat software as just a box, they do," the reader wrote. "They sell it as-is. You buy it at your own risk, and the software is already obsolete, because there isn't any version information on the box. It sells at the same price that it did when it was first introduced, even though they know a new version is coming out and the old version won't be supported anymore. But when they want to treat software as a license, they do. So they can get yearly license fees, even if you don't need or want upgrades or bug fixes. And you can't resell it or take it off one machine and use it on another."

Another reader recalled her experience from several years back waiting on hold for Veritas support. "One day I spent three hours waiting before the utter boredom drove me nuts and I hung up. So I brought a book with me the next day. Unfortunately, I discovered that the Veritas hold time was longer than my speed of reading a rather small book. I ran out of book after about six hours. And I still had about an hour and a half to go before I got someone."

One reader was amazed by a Symantec spokesperson's suggestion that customers not reboot their systems so as not to suffer from a bug in the product activation of Norton Anti Virus2004. "The thing that really gets me is that someone with that level of ability can rise to a position where they are allowed to present themselves as a company spokesperson," the reader wrote. "In the last month or so, at least six customers have called me because their antivirus was expiring. All had previous versions of Norton which I had sold them. I referred all of them to Pandasoftware.com, even though I won't make a penny that way."

And numerous readers noted with glee a recent news story in which Dell officials said they would stop routing support calls from corporate customers to an overseas call center and handle them in the United States instead. "It's about time Dell realized that it's not just a matter of heavy accents," wrote one reader. "Corporate customers need to be able to talk to someone who knows more than what it says on a script. We were getting that before they took their support offshore, and that's what they need to provide us again."