RE: Best idea of the week, make that year. Yeah, yeah, I know the year just started

["David Locke" <dlocke -at- texas -dot- net>]

The UI here is to the company and not a computer program. As such, the UI is
the responsibility of the executives of the company, not a UI designer.

If this company only had one product, it could be feasible to create a dummy
company whose product name was the same as the company name. Then, when they
were paid by credit card, the product name would appear on ANY credit card
bill, because that is how they bill.

How many times have you paid for something and the invoice said something
like "This charge will appear as xyz corp. on your bill."

Everybody designs UIs. Every system has a UI. If a UI designer has a job,
it's because an executive somewhere in the company pushed for that. That
boils down to a company being responsible for the interface.

The problem wasn't one of too many customer support calls. It started with a
company that decided to push costs off on to the customer. The customers
pushed back. When we send out pdfs, instead of printed manuals, we are doing
the same thing. Cutting our costs and raising the customer's costs. When we
single source to the point of eliminating all but one treatment, we drive up
customer costs. But, why care. Those costs are invisible. Well, the
purchasing process "innovations" that emerged during the bust are pushing
back against these invisible costs, and software companies are going out of
business for abusing their customers with these invisible costs. CFOs know
they aren't getting what they paid for and these invisible costs are driving
the CFO's intuition.

David Locke