
What do I do about a software vendor who has failed to deliver? - throwitaway01
We area  manufacturing firm who have purchased expensive software.<p>Six months after final payment the vendor has said &quot;won&#x27;t fix&quot; to a feature requirement clearly laid out in the contract of sale and made perfectly clear in person during initial delivery.<p>What do I do now?
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WheelsAtLarge
I've dealt with something similar in the past. You can take them to court but
you'll spend 1000's just to get started and a few years from now, and you win,
you might get something in terms of money. But can the company pay or will
they even care to pay? You can scare them and contact a lawyer to send them a
few scary letters and they might respond since they don't want to deal with
courts either.

Your best bet is to bite the bullet and negotiate a modification to the
contract and pay to get it done from them. Try to get the source code and get
the project done at the least cost. Yes, it sux!

If you have the source code you can hire a programmer to finish the project.
We get used to paying a few 1000 dollars for "expensive" software but custom
software is very expensive 40-50k is cheap when you have to hire someone.

The extreme case is to just dump the project. I don't know for sure but I
suspect that a great number of software projects are just abandoned due to
failure to deliver features and the budget gets depleted.

Good Luck!

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throwitaway01
It's an interesting case.

I'm personally responsible for selecting the vendor, the package cost around
the AU$25,000 and the module to interface with this particular machine was a
$3100 line item included in that total, to write the module from scratch using
the manufacturers specification for the language the machine reads.

They already had a module they'd written for a very similar machine from the
same manufacturer. They've made a few tweaks to it, but are now saying the
algorithm from the core product isn't designed to do what I want to do and
they doubt head office will approve the expenditure to change it.

It's an industry standard procedure, and we have collective experience with
two other software packages that fulfil the requirement by default.

I personally cannot fathom how they would get to the point of saying "no", but
it's definitely been an interesting view in to the realm of commercial /
industrial software sales, development, etc.

I don't know how I am going to advocate to my employer that we continue to pay
the $3000 per year maintenance fee for unlimited upgrades and support when
they can't even deliver on what they agreed to.

That and the core software is _riddled_ with minor, but _annoying_ bugs.

If they could fix this issue with the module for our machine, and chip away at
the smaller issues over time it would actually be _perfect_ for our needs.

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
What you experianced was a sales person needing to make a sale. They will
promise and then they hope the programmers/techs will deliver. It's very
common for software sales, in any field, to do this.

Here's another common got you. They will sell you the software very cheaply
and get you to use it in your business. Once the software becomes an important
part of your business they will sell you upgrades at many times the original
price. At which time you'll have to choose between upgrading or dealing with
old buggie software. Switching to another vendor won't be an option since it
will be much more expensive than the upgrade. They have you.

There are just too many unknowns to say that just because it works in one
model it will be a quick change for another model. It sounds like the mods are
for very specialized software so most likely you have no choice but to work it
out with them.

Look for alternatives but I dought there are any. They probably understand
their competitors enough that they know that saying no to you is a safe bet.
Your job now is to lay down some options for your boss and let him choose.
It's very important that you don't hide anything from him. He needs to know
and understand everything. It's just life. We can't always get 100% of what we
want.

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mtmail
You can get lawyers involved and sue for breach of contract.

