In my position within the enterprise vertical,  backdating to the
expiration (not the payment date) seems to be the norm.  Cisco does
this on SmartNet, as does SolarWinds and a number of other vendors
I've worked with.  We don't typically slip on the dates intentionally,
but our procurement and legal groups have a habit of fighting over
wording on the contracts.

David.


On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Daniel Seagraves
<dseag...@humancapitaldev.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 21, 2011, at 1:09 PM, Edward Dore wrote:
>
>> On 21 Dec 2011, at 18:46, Nathan Eisenberg wrote:
>>
>>>> In fact, it's not.  If you miss your renewal payment for, frex, Safari
>>>> books,
>>>> they actually slip your cycle date to when you renew -- since you don't
>>>> *get*
>>>> the service between the expire date and the renew date, I concur with
>>>> his
>>>> appraisal that you shouldn't be paying for it, either.
>>>>
>>>> If in fact, the service *kept working* for a short time when an
>>>> overlooked payment was missed, it would be a different story.
>>>>
>>>> But, effectively, he's a new client, and should probably be treated
>>>> that way.
>>>> Assuming the paid service is actually *the update service*.
>>>>
>>>> I also disagree with your proposition that this is off-topic for NANOG,
>>>> really.
>>>
>>> I've always strongly felt that this was a rather foul business practice, 
>>> wherever I've seen it.  The justification for it is the utterly misguided 
>>> belief that, if allowed to, customers will pay for a month then cancel 
>>> their subscription and 'coast' on the 'current' version of the signature 
>>> for a year.  This approach suffers from (at least) two fundamental flaws:
>>>
>>> 1) The entire customer base are treated as hostile.  It is no surprise that 
>>> they resent this.  (Assumption: having resentful customers is bad)
>>> 2) Spam is, perhaps moreso than ever, a rapidly evolving threat.  The 
>>> effectiveness of signatures declines dramatically with time, which means 
>>> that August's signatures have little value by December.  [By the way, it 
>>> seems to me that if they're willing to charge for valueless signatures, 
>>> that represents either A) doubt as to the value of the current signatures, 
>>> or B) disbelief in the decreasing value of out of date signatures.]
>>>
>>> While I realize that car insurance might not be the best analogy subject, 
>>> imagine if you put your car on blocks, went off to college and allowed the 
>>> insurance to lapse whilst you were there.  When you return, the insurance 
>>> company wants you to pay the last three years of insurance in order to 
>>> reactivate your policy.  That companies customers would react in the same 
>>> way: they would find a new provider to do business with, rather than pay 
>>> out for a valueless bit of smoke and mirrors.
>>>
>>> Nathan Eisenberg
>>
>> Are you turning your anti-spam appliance off whilst choosing not to pay for 
>> the maintenance? If not, then I'd argue that a better analogy would be that 
>> you don't pay for your car insurance but continue to drive your car around 
>> until you have an accident, at which point you try to take out a new policy 
>> so that you are covered.
>>
>> Whilst I can see the argument for the likes of signature updates, where you 
>> aren't receiving the service in the period that you haven't paid for (unless 
>> the signature update system is seriously broken), these kind of maintenance 
>> renewals for appliances normally also include software support and hardware 
>> repair/replacement.
>>
>> If the companies don't backdate the maintenance renewal, then you would end 
>> up with lots of companies only purchasing the maintenance on an ad-hoc basis 
>> and that will just make the renewals more expensive for those of us that 
>> actually pay attention to when our subscriptions to due to expire and how 
>> much they will cost to renew in order accurately predict cash flow.
>
>
> <rant>
> Besides, treating your customers like thieves and/or forcing disagreeable 
> conditions on them is all the rage now! Everyone knows they can screw 
> customers as hard as they like because everyone else is going to screw them 
> just as hard, and if you aren't screwing them hard enough, well that's just 
> wasted potential right there! Don't worry about them leaving for another 
> provider - They all do it! I mean, look at the airlines: Company profits in 
> the toilet, customer satisfaction so low they're trying to get Congress 
> involved, crew pay at the lowest on record, and the salaries of the upper 
> management is the highest in the history of the industry! Just think, if you 
> screw your customers hard enough, YOU could be NEXT sitting on that huge pile 
> of cash in the top of your ivory tower pissing down on the public!
>
> For example, I have a large pile of content that I have paid for but cannot 
> access anymore because their various copy protection schemes are no longer 
> supported or no longer run on modern machines. Next to that I have a smaller 
> but increasingly growing stack of content I paid for but REFUSE to access due 
> to provisions hidden in the EULA requiring me to display advertisements 
> and/or install spyware on my computer. You can't read the EULA before 
> purchase and you can't return the purchase for a refund if you refuse the 
> EULA. (That's right, you can sell AD-SUPPORTED software that customers pay 
> FULL RETAIL PRICE for! They whine and complain on the internet, but believe 
> you me, when the next iteration comes out, they'll line up to buy it!) I 
> could resort to illegal hacks that disable the DRM or remove the ads, but 
> that is a federal offense and a security risk, and I don't feel like wasting 
> my computer or career over a few hundred dollars. So they join the pile. The 
> companies who do this actually consider this situation desirable - They got 
> my money, and I'm not going to be downloading patches or using up server time 
> or anything. Pure profit! It's win-win!
>
> Executive Summary: It doesn't matter what your customers want anymore. You 
> just give them what you want to give them, and if they don't take it, you 
> punish them until they give up and go away (and don't worry about that, 
> they'll be back!) or accept your conditions. Thar's gold in them thar hills, 
> you just gotta go beat it out of em!
> </rant>
>
>

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