Making A request to IBM

[Richard A Johnson]

karish at mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes:

>In article <1991Mar14.031806.3002 at appmag.com> pa at appmag.com
>(Pierre Asselin) writes:

>Your CE is the hardware support person.  The SE is the one to
>go to.  She's the one whose responsibility it is to help you
>put all the pieces of hardware and software together to make
>a working system, and she works out of IBM's regional sales
>office.

I find that *I* usually know a WHOLE LOT more about what's going on with these
RS/6000s than either my SE *or* most of the people I talk to in Austin!  I've
been trying to get a technical phone support number for YEARS and it's simply
impossible.  IBM doesn't work that way.  If you have a software bug, you call
software support, but unless you can formulate your question as though it were
a bug report you're pretty much on your own.

>That's the place to go to provide customer input
>about desired changes/new products.

I have tried to turn in software change requests MANY times and they get
NOWHERE.  My SE says she has tried turning in a "Design Change Request" form
(the form a person in Austin told me to turn in) and it got nowhere.  She
says apparently Austin isn't taking change requests in that form.  Supposedly
they're using some "different route for requesting changes" which she can't
find anything about.  The latest thing the people in Austin said on this was:
"You should be able to check on the availability of [the program you're
interested in] via 'Hone access'."  My SE said she knew what this meant but
couldn't find anything useful.  Thus, I ask:

How do you go about turning in a software change request to Austin?  I would
love to suggest (somewhat strongly!) that they get a REAL xterm program
(i.e. if they want to say they support X11 Rev. 3, they should have an X11
Rev. 3 xterm, not an X10 version which has been ported to X11 as aixterm really
is.)  Maybe by the time I get a straight answer on this they will have gone
to X11 Rev. 4?  Will they port aixterm to Rev. 4 and ignore the X11R4 xterm
still?

Oh well, someone a while back posted a X11R3 and X11R4 xterm so I guess I can
use those but (1) this nonsense doesn't help IBM's position w.r.t. universities
or anyone else in the know w.r.t. X11 and (2) the newly posted X11R3 xterm
gets its bottom line cut off when you're using MWM (now who's at fault THERE?).

The struggle for consistency goes on...