[clug] weird tender requirements

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Fri Oct 27 00:46:35 GMT 2006


On 27 Oct 2006, at 10:27, Andrew Smith wrote:

> Perhaps suggest the various alternate open formats _after_ winning  
> the tender :)

At which point you have (i) reinforced the vendor lock-in as an  
acceptable situation, and (ii) weakened your position for supporting  
non-proprietary formats.

Make lots of noise and rattle a few cages "out of band", and then  
submit the tender in a Word-readable format that is (if possible) not  
".doc". RTF works in most instances - just be careful that you  
actually read the document using Word 2003 before sending it off to  
the client. If they can't read the tender, you can't win the bid!

Pity you can't charge the customer for compliance costs in pre-tender  
stage, and that requiring MS-Word in order to get their business  
doesn't count as third party tie in (since you're not buying a  
product, you're selling).

Alex



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