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ISAC Congress Executives participage in Collusion! Just one more stupidity by a manufacturer From: Mario Roederer ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Date: Tue Jun 28 1994 - 16:59:16 EST •    Next message: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it : platelets and calcium •    Previous message: Robert Rainer: Fixation prior to staining •    Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ________________________________________ I just wanted to relate a little story... draw from it your own conclusions. 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