Do you use this line in your contracts?

Don't waste your time, I am going to make you read this to find the line.

This is the point as well. Who reads contracts? Raise your hand!

Now who writes their contracts?

How many of you ask your client if you can steal money from them on every project?

Yes you read that correctly.

In subcontracting some work we received contracts which include a line that says something along the lines of:

This project may run over our estimates, we will provide additional billing upon client approval.

So this is a license to steal. Why you ask? Because what incentive do you have to finish the project? What stops you from saying, in the middle of it all, we need 100 more hours and if you say no, well it's not finished so we will leave you in a mess.
And I have seen this many times happen through the years, used to be SAP projects or .Net applications, SEO companies, website designers, roofers/construction and movers.

I bet every single Microsoft Business Partner uses this line as projects from any of them came in under budget or under time. Especially those laughable attempts at rewriting Domino applications in .NET.

This is probably the best way to admit you have no idea what you are doing.

Now, I admit things happen, problems arise and delays occur but didn't you take any of that into consideration when you wrote the estimate? Even if you are double charging someone(like the armies $400 hammers) why would you include this line?

Our contracts never say this. We due exempt us and clients from acts of God, after all I live in a hurricane zone, but that doesn't change costs, just sometimes delays in completion.

If I quote a project, that is the price, don't ask me to discount it, unless you are paying upfront in full, in cash. I am not a sales person. I am a business man. Business needs can never be discounted, otherwise they are no longer needs are they?

So if you get proposals which include this line, just toss it and the vendor and find someone open and honest and upfront. You will save a ton of money in the end.

Or spend double having someone clean up the 1st vendor's cheap price or over time heavy project that is still not completed.

Windows 7, Same As It Ever Was

Many years ago in some discussions with Microsoft I was asked what they should do to get companies to upgrade from Windows 2000 or 2003 to Windows 2007, I don't recall exactly, but the answer was the same from me.

Make it an in place solution and they will follow, like IBM does with Domino.

Now it is true, you may be out of luck if trying to install Domino 8.5.1 on a Windows 2000 server(it works, but unsupported) as one client found.

But this is a rare case. After all, that OS is now +/- 9 years old .

But every Domino version in memory just installs over itself, from version to version. Like any product should. Exchange however needs an OS refresh first.

Now look at Windows 7 and what do we, as consumers at home get? An error message when we try to update our XP machines to Windows 7. And it then proceeds to tell you there is no path from XP to Window 7.

You know this already, but what do you tell consumers? Buy new equipment? In truth it is probably cheaper in many ways to do so.

Microsoft still doesn't get the fact that the reason so many people stayed on Windows and Exchange 2000 or 2003 is the headache and cost of doing what could be a simple upgrade.

The IBM way for Domino makes it so simple, I even did a video of a server being updated in 3 minutes. If Microsoft had done that, where would the apple commercials be? And where would the majority of the world?

IBM continues to win customers by showing how resources can be used, not wasted, to build productive environments that can be maintained for years to come.

Corporations and individuals do not have an IT "Old Age Home" where they maintain extinct Operating Systems and other software just in case they need old data. Some keep those machines running forever, but at what cost? My data, as I have said many times, is still accessible to me just like it was in 1993 when I first started using Lotus Notes.

That is Data Mining.