A newspaper publisher asked the software company I own, Tower Systems, to develop an enhancement to our newsagency software to help them and help newsagents. As usual with such publisher requests, there was no offer to cover our costs – development, testing, roll out and support will cost us more than $15,000. The cost would be less if we delivered the enhancement as part of our next scheduled software update – due in September. Rather than wait for our scheduled update, a representative of the publisher clumsily emailed us two days ago, talking about a competitor…
… have told us that they have completed building this new functionality into their system and are working with us to test it now. I imagine they will be trying to market it with their new software shortly as it poses quite a benefit for newsagents.
It is disappointing that a publisher posting a multi billion dollar profit result expects small business software companies like mine to develop and deploy functionality exclusively for them and to a time schedule to suit them. It is offensive that one of their representatives tries to make out that a competitor is better than us because they may deliver this one change ahead of us. We have responded the only way we can – by taking our software developers off newsagent requested enhancements and putting them on the enhancements required by the publisher.
I and my company have been good and faithful servants of newsagents, publishers and their other suppliers for more than twenty five years. Sometimes, newsagent supplier behavior makes me question why I remain involved. This forum at least allows the opportunity to vent.