I'm a small business co-owner, but we're also a growing business, and ambitious at that. Dear "Enterprise" software vendor that desperately tries to look mightier than it is, understand that I'm making sure it's in our DNA to filter out your opaque, overly complex sales processes from the get-go. Not only will we not look at your product that won't tell its price publicly, but I've made it company policy that anyone foolish enough to waste time with such vendors will see their contract terminated. I'm not an OSS zealot by any measure, but if your price is not public, you're pretty much admitting your product is weak and overpriced.

We will not tolerate this crap and we will protect our productivity from your pre-sales BS. I bet that more and more businesses have been coming to similar conclusions these last few years. You want to see a company that gets it? Check out Atlassian (I'm not even their customer but these guys seem to do a lot of things right, from marketing to hiring).

I'm looking at security software in a couple different categories and bumped several times into this very brand of company that really, really doesn't want our business. I guess they're preying off bloated big companies because of widespread incompetence and CYA insecurity. These past few years, I think UltraDNS was the most egregious offender in the way they tried to sell to us. Those guys were really hilarious. We told them to never contact us again and eventually switched to Nettica for DNS management. Costs us $50 a year too for what I'm pretty sure is the same service.

It's surprising how often the proper answer is just, "give me a break."

Got the worst and best out of Macy's today. It didn't start that well. They have a clearance right now but when it was time to pay on their site, they wouldn't take my debit card. Since I have a Visa with a US bank that I order with on American web sites all the time, that wasn't expected. I IMed one of their reps to ask what was going on, and that was the first good surprise, as someone who knew how to properly spell English spotted in 30 seconds that I was ordering through a non-US ISP, which macys.com won't allow. The rep pointed me to a phone number which I called a couple hours later.

Over the phone, another rep took my order very nicely and patiently, though we were both bitching at macys.com extreme sluggishness by then (must be the clearance). She found extra discounts on pretty much every product I wanted to order and threw free shipping on top of it though I was under the $150 that qualified for it. I paid $107 for 5 brand-name sweaters and a jacket!

Macy's, kudos for your rep training and your pricing flexibility to save face, protect your brand and make a customer happy. Macys.com, get bigger servers to handle clearances and rewrite your error messages, thanks.

I had mixed feelings about a campaign that a buyer rushed in a couple days ago. Still, we ran the ad, and, well, we ended with a bit of egg on our faces today: MarketingVOX Snookered by Trojan Horse. Hey, at least we've got the scoop on our own mess. We'll sure do more due diligence upfront next time we feel something is not quite right with a campaign.