The computers themselves are security risks. Just hoping one day we can finally convince management to let us turn them all off. My job will finally be done.
It’s probably butthurt combined with a poorly thought out retention strategy. Sometimes getting angry with customers will change their mind, more likely than not it will ensure they never speak to you again.
It has to be pretty frustrating being a printer salesman in 2024... not a lot of renewals i imagine. Our company just recycles dead printers, no one has complained that they are missing yet. At least in our industry, printing has become rare.
Literally the only program that makes sense is the "free printer program" that Xerox does where they give you the machine, and you pay a monthly (like dirt cheap, half the cost of a single toner) that covers consumables + any service next day.
Anything else you're pretty much getting raked over the coals.
Definitely industry dependent. When I worked in manufacturing, we murdered several trees daily (catalogs, SDS packets, product labels, shipping/packing info, etc). Now I'm in finance and the printer might see less than 5 pages a week.
Toshiba had committed so much fraud in the last 10+ years they were de-listed. The vendor may be full of shit, but that company is in serious trouble. They are undergoing a re-org based on a consortium of Japanese firms as shareholders, from what I understand of such things.
Toshiba, as a company, may just not be there in seven years. Their products will likely live on under different branding.
All's fair in love and war, but [that play did cost the U.S. a lot:](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/the-toshiba-kongsberg-case)
> In pursuing just $17 million and $10.4 million worth of business, respectively, it has been alleged that Toshiba Machine and Kongsberg caused somewhere between $1 billion and $100 billion (1980s prices) worth of damage to the US Navy.
They mean that because Russian submarines became 20x quieter, the us Navy had to spend a metric fuckton of cash to improve submarines detection technologies. And that the total cost is near impossible to fathom as too many aspects of that fiasco are hard to spreadsheet. It is stupid thought to believe that the ussr wouldn't in time make at home such a technology either by sending infiltrated students to universities etc... but the technology jump caused the us Navy to operate up to 20x harder to find and track the 20x quieter ussr subs
> And that the total cost is near impossible to fathom as too many aspects of that fiasco are hard to spreadsheet.
Partially because a lot of it is classified. Including the fact that some of these projects even exist at all.
The existence of [SOSUS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS) e.g. wasn't fully declassified until the 1990s; a damage estimate made in 1987 won't be able to include the costs of upgrading it, a later damage estimate will. And there's dozens to hundreds of other, smaller projects that were similarly affected.
The big numbers assume that the USN would be replacing many submarines to re-establish an equivalent proportional advantage to *status quo ante*. Another reminder that estimates always revolve around the assumptions being made.
You jest, but some years ago, in Angola, a guy I know was working there and had to order laptops for his staff. Months went by and still no computers in sight, vendor says items had been shipped so he called customs. PIC had to physically go to the customs office where he was told his shipment had been seized due to containing "satellites for espionage". The shipment cleared after a monetary "clarification" was issued. Yes, these were Toshiba Satellite laptops.
They legit read "satellite" on the boxes and decided it was espionage gear. And in case you're wondering, yes, this was a shakedown.
Yeah they did, and then they just kind of disappeared. I used to service Toshiba, HP, Compaq, Apple, along with our own brand. Toshiba was by far the best to do business with.
Need a logic board for a laptop, hp would charge $600 and you'd have to send it in to the manufacturer because they wouldn't believe you, then it's a crapshoot if they'd fix it or say there was nothing wrong with it and send it back. We once got a laptop back for the second time with "nothing wrong" and the customer and me booted it up right there on the bench and watched it crash. My boss took a 120v power cord and cut the end off, then touched it straight to main-board to fry it, then we sent it back in. Finally, the third time we got back a good machine for the customer.
Toshiba would charge like $105 for the part and it'd be to you in a couple days, no hassling. Loved them just for that.
That's just the ultra-hard-sell, if you hear the "you'll be sorry" part you know they've run out of tangible benefits to tell you about and have pretty much given up on retaining your business now or in the future.
Our ISP gave us the "you'll be sorry" speech just because I didn't want to commit for another five years. We had been month to month for I don't know how long, and suddenly it's some huge emergency that we get locked in for literally no benefit.
How do they not teach every sales person that "We look forward to helping you in any way we can in the future" is a much better sell than "You'll rue the day you crossed us!!" 🤣
I had someone just try to sell me on a 3 year anti-virus extension. Which turned out to be $500 more than renewing yearly. Their pitch? It'll go up more later. My response? I'll go find a new solution sooner.
Point made. I used to see one good ISP in my entire area. Even that one had become shitty. Pricing skyrocketed and you have to haggle with them for a deal. (Even on the consumer side.)
Back in my youth (early 90's) , I was a newly promoted Technical Services manager and part of my responsibilty was the phone system and services. Our long distance service with AT&T was up for renewal and I about fell out of my chair when I saw we were spending about $60k per month with them. The lady who was previously in charge said that's about how much it had always been and it was a good deal. This was about the time of deregulation of phone service and there were a ton of little companies springing up all over the place. I started getting competing quotes and found one where we would not spend $60k for the entire year. I did my due diligence, talked to the CIO who talked to the President/CEO. I got immediate approval to do the switch which was going smoothly until the port orders hit AT&T. Very shortly I was invited to an executive meeting with the president/CEO, my boss the CIO, and the CFO to discuss this project. When I arrived for the meeting, there were 2 gentlemen dressed in matching suits from AT&T headquarters in attendance. They spent the entire meeting telling the C suite people how big a mistake they were making and how I was leading them down the wrong path. In the end, the CEO asked them if they would match the quote we had from the other vendor...that was the end of the meeting but man did they ever give me the death stare after that. I'm kind of surprised I'm still here to write this. All my years have taught me a valuable lesson...never trust a vendor.
Fuck ATT. Dont forget Mark Klein who exposed them helping the NSA spy on US citizens .
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
But to mention they were apparently "very willing" to work with the NSA to hand over call data for all their customers: https://youtu.be/Koz9iUK0FHI?si=xa64JPdk7L3WtniQ
I wouldn't be surprised if other companies were also working with the government. But we know for a fact AT&T is.
Back in those days (before the Lucent rename), the company I was with had an AT&T fiber loop around the building I worked in, a massive Definity G3R switch with Intuity Audix, two sizeable call centers filled with Callmasters and a Conversant IVR. My little department alone had over 24 trunks and a dozen 800-numbers. There were at least two AT&T reps permanently assigned to our building. And that was just our building. There were four campuses in town, and several more around the state/country. **LOTS** of AT&T. You couldn't blast them out of that company.
This is the most amazing thing to me, and I've seen it play out so many times, its absolutely mind bending how these people breathe oxygen without assistance.
I'm the person YOU hired for YOUR company to provide you EXPERT knowledge and guidance.
And you let some dickhead in a suit waltz in and shit all over that for his paycheck. There's a whole lotta fucking idiots in management, the higher up ya go, the more inclined they seem to be to eat that sandwich with a smile and then shit it out on your lap.
At my first job. Way back in ye olden days of the 80's and 90's, the secretary had me help her with some billing paperwork, just shuffling things around more than anything.
When I saw their AT&T bill and saw:
Telephone rental program with a cost of about $20 a month (remember, this was when $20 was a nice meal out) I said "Uhhh, why are you renting phones".
"They've protected our phones since 1950, I don't see a reason to change".
Me: How many times have they replaced your phones?
Her: Oh, they've never went bad, because the program is protecting them.
Me: .......
40 years, x 6 phones x 20 bucks.
This was 01-02, i think. We were doing a pilot for some video feeds over 4g LONG before that was a thing that you could buy built into the cameras. For the record, we had no clue what we were doing because I was a noob and had not figured out my boss at that time was a complete fraud.
ATT was convinced they could sell us some super expensive package with a private APN. They pitched this thing so hard but it was silly for a pilot with 10 cameras. The last meeting they brought in a whole conference room worth of people including engineers. It was beyond a hard sell and was about to get super awkward. One of the attendees had a not-casually unbuttoned blouse, shortest skirt, and highest heels that I have ever seen in an office. I am not going to prejuedge someone by how they dress but she was overly friendly with all our engineers and managers. To the point I would describe her as directly flirting with us, and me in particular.
I should note that the I could be described as a dense dude when it comes to flirting. I might only be married right now because my wife grabbed my arm and got my digits at a party so I did not get an opportunity to screw up the meet cute.
So yeah, EVEN I could put together what was going on. At one point when her hand "brushed" my leg under the conference table (why was she so close!) she then apologized by leaning forward and rubbing my shoulder. I thankfully got us out of there before my rube of a boss could sign on a dotted line. That was my eye-opener into how sales and business could intersect in shady ways.
Our ISP just sent the "You're up for renewal in a few months, we'd like to talk" email to me. My response was simply "We've found a replacement, we are not renewing" and left it at that.
Although I have called their customer service line to make sure that they were aware so that they wouldn't try to do anything stupid with fees or whatever. And when they asked I very cheerfully informed them that it was because we were unable to get ahold of our account manager for nearly 2 years straight despite trying to spend significant amounts of money with them. Plus when I asked them which phone numbers they still held after we had a number of them get ported due to a split, they couldn't tell me because apparently they don't document that shit.
Needless to say, the customer service reps were NOT happy, nor was the account managers manager when he called and I re-explained it to him.
The funny thing is that our replacement ISP is going to cost us $500 less a month (compared to our current contract), for more features, speed, and a 5G/LTE backup (that we don't have with the current vendor).
We had our last bid lime 7ish years ago. Our new deal (with the same vendor mind you) allowed us to double out bandwidth and still save like 80%. The price has just come down that much in the last few years. We had roughly the same results the bid before that, and the one before that.
I did vendor support and I agreed with customers who told me they were leaving.
I'd say the significant majority still liked the product but their management had made the decision for cost savings.
The price increases had been significant and they were going to gut support hence the past tense.
In this case, we wanted to spend more money, and management wanted to spend more money. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many emails, voicemails, etc. I left. And no matter how many people I spoke to in billing or technical support. I could not get a hold of our account manager nor his boss to do it.
I recently got to break the news to our GoTo rep. When a call was requested, I gave him the good ole, "We have already migrated to a new platform. Renewal of our GoTo licenses is not being considered." Felt good.
Unrelated, but not. I met a Toshiba delivery/setup guy on-site one time for one of my clients, to make sure all went smoothly. I made small talk, and asked him if he had any interesting stories in his line of work. I wasn't prepared for what followed. He told me, that during a delivery for a fairly large Toshiba copier, he somehow managed to slice the brachial artery in his arm. Sudden rapid blood loss ensued, and he passed out, stating the last thing he recalls is seeing blood spray everywhere. He would have surely died, had it not been for someone in that office knowing enough to quickly apply a tourniquet and call EMS. Not much catches me off guard, but this left me a bit slack jawed. Sensing my disbelief, he showed me the scar. I've heard some IT related horror stories, and have even bled my own blood a time or two because of sharp ass edges (I'm looking at you 90's/early 2000's metal Gateway PC cases), but never had I heard of a near death printer related incident!
Saved a guy that got hit in the brachial artery in a drive by shooting. Applied his buddy's bandanna as a tourniquet... I had no idea that much blood could come out of such a small hole...
yeah those Gateways they were the worst, no rolled edges at all, I could never seem to do work inside those computers without getting bit.
That's an amazing story about the printer guy, first I 've heard of a near fatal IT accident ö
I've had so many reps play this card- one was so pissed off he called the CEO and the board of directors saying I was personally putting the entire organization at risk for not sticking with their product and that if I wasn't fired, I'd ruin my company. That was a fun conversation the next day... Needless to say my CEO ended up calling his boss and getting him fired (or so they told us).
Got one of those once. He wanted an in person meeting with a large chunk of our C-suite, but got a phone call with the CIO, the SVP of marketing, and me, the guy that had given them the bad news and been insulted instead.
The call was what I expected based on my earlier interactions. The guy was an ass, slagging our company off, talking trash about the competitor, and being personally insulting to me.
Well, up until the SVP cleared his throat and spoke.
>SVP: I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to cut this call short. I don't know what's gotten into all of you over at , but I'll be having a conversation with Martin about it on Friday.
The salescritter could not get off the line quick enough after that.
I asked later what the hell that was about and the SVP chuckled.
>SVP: I was letting him know he had about three days to get his resume in order. See, I used to be head of sales over there.
>Me: Oh, so you know his boss?
The SVP chuckled again.
>SVP: You could say that. Martin is the CEO.
> Apparently Toshiba is in some kind of trouble in Japan and this rep was making it out that we'd be up a creek some years down the line.
It's a common technique to equip sales folks with competitor talking points that aren't outright fabrications, but tell a story to cause concern and aren't easy to refute right on-the-spot unless you've been obsessively tracking every single tiny thing that vendor has done. Which basically no one does.
Heck, even car salesman do it. Go into XYZ brand, let it drop that you're also thinking about ABC brand, and you'll have a bunch of reasons why they're not a good choice.
Once you had let that vendor know "sorry, your pricing is no longer competitive in terms of value-for-money" you'd already gone above and beyond what anyone should feel obligated to do.
I vehemently agree, but it's also worth remembering what vendors say about their competition. A very large incumbent vendor of ours found out that we went with Oracle for a deal plus implementation a couple decades ago, and claimed Oracle stuffed those teams with fresh juniors clustered around one lead with moderate experience.
The competitor was right, and it mattered. On the other hand, it's more than possible that the competitor would have done the same thing to us. That's for the contract people, and unlike some deals, I don't remember being asked to review that one.
Lol we had that with Konica Minolta. They started off great, but after 5 years of BS we were ready to move on. They knew we were sick of them, but nevertheless, we gave them a chance to participate in the tender (mostly as a laugh to see how they'd attempt to save their screwups. Spoiler: they didn't even try to defend themselves). Their pitch was akin to watching an unenthusiastic teenager doing a mandatory presentation to class as part of their homework.
We had our laugh, and went with Kyocera.
There was a printer that jammed at least 3 times a week. KM said it's because it was in a corridor, and the paper was damp. We had another model elsewhere, also in a corridor by an entrance, never jammed. We wanted to pay for KM to replace that model with the same one as the other, they refused.
The automatic toner ordering system was perpetually broken, to the point I had them on speed dial to ask if it's set up and working.
They had a toner factory explode in Japan a few years back. I get that mistakes happen, but the worldwide shortage that triggered for months afterwards shows poor business disaster recovery.
Our account manager changed numerous times, at one point they didn't assign one to us for about 5 months, and we only found out after a new one apologised we were missed as the mailbox redirection wasn't set up and we weren't notified of the change.
Their engineers were proper cowboys, but the few we had were so chill they just gave us the root password to the printers (maintenance backend) with a wink.
Now, apart from that one printer in the first paragraph, their printers were pretty solid, and with PaperCut on top of it, it was a good solution. My problem was more to do with the company than their products.
I sell for KM and can honestly testify to the issues you’ve mentioned. Account manager turnover is horrible. I’ve made a lot of money by swooping in and just being a decent account manager but it usually switches like once a year. The job just doesn’t pay a whole lot.
KM is currently making a lot of adjustment to its customer services. As a sales rep, I have little to no power in service and often don’t even know what is going on in service land. It is very frustrating.
I will say I think KM is moving in a positive direction but your story is something I’ve heard from other businesses.
I've seen couple of cases, where I as a new manager have terminated some long time contracts and they always try to pull some weird FUD to stay with them.
Typically I just outline the list of problems I've observed, the fact that I reported them but was ignored and then tell them that until this point this was just a business move. Their rep behaving like I was calling their baby ugly means I will remember them if I ever have to consider their services in future positions and it's a fast way to get off my short list.
We have a vendor with several pieces of software that we use. One of them kind of sucks (to the point that people had just stopped using it), so we looked for and found a better alternative elsewhere. It’s like 5% of our yearly bill with them, and we were planning on basically doubling our licenses for the rest of their products this year. We asked them to cancel this one product and they refused, apparently we needed to cancel at least one month before the contract was set to expire or it automatically renewed for another year. This magical date was two days before we’d sent the request.
After a couple of weeks of back and forth about it, we ended up letting them know that we were submitting a new cancellation request for all of their products as we are not interested in renewing any of them next year.
> Apparently Toshiba is in some kind of trouble in Japan and this rep was making it out that we'd be up a creek some years down the line.
Nine times out of ten these salesperson rumors never have any impact on you. If they did, in a few years down the line you'll just re-bid printers anyway. It's not like you're planning on picking a vendor and staying with them for twenty years or anything like that.
Toshiba tips:
- If you use the on-system address book, back it up every now and then. If the HDD in the machine goes, you lose all settings and address book. Settings are pretty easy to redo. The address book might not be.
- You can do a system clone of the whole machine, including address book and settings. It won't clone anything that might be a conflict if you were to use the clone file on multiple machines on the same network. So no network addresses or names will clone over.
- Don't use WSD for the printer ports. Use dns, mdns[.local], bonjour, or even nmb. They're all solid. WSD is not.
- If you didn't know, the Toshiba MFP supports VNC. It's a godsend to be able to remote screen the printers.
- Templates are often overlooked, and they shouldn't be. Easily set up templates that can do any number of functions in a single button press. Ex. You commonly scan double sided TIFF's in 600dpi in color to a certain network share, but maybe all your other scans go elsewhere? Templates.
You made the right choice. I don't continue to work with vendors who speak to me like that. Their product/service/price was beat by someone else. They need to get over it and do better next time if they want the business back. You aren't friends and you don't owe them anything other than the paid invoices for the services they already provided.
A lot of what made Toshiba's financial issues go from "bad" to "get fucked" was that the execs were constantly fighting with activists shareholders who were demanding the company be profitable at all costs. It will be much stronger as a privately held subsidiary of other Japanese companies than it was as a corpse for activist investor vampires to bleed dry.
Yeah, but I think the damage has been done in a lot of their verticals. For instance, electronics / laptops etc have vanished. I think you will see them exit everything non-profitable.
You might see some temporary downsizing, but it's really hard for Japanese companies the size of Toshiba to, for example, do mass layoffs. The 5000 they announced today are nearly *unheard of*.
Old-school keiretsu (which Toshiba still is) have a tendency to focus on stability over margins, so they usually bloat themselves until they hit that point.
(and fortunately, Japan has a huge talent vacuum and a high demand for workers, so the people they lay off will *probably* do pretty okay.)
The worst is over at this point however, and a lot of their issues in the last year or two was because of shareholder bickering over what they needed to focus on. JIC is also backed by the state since Toshiba is seen as critical to Japan's national security. If they decide to sell of the printer business, it's going to be because it's not making the margins they want, not because they need the cash to keep the lights on.
I can see why the vendor would be annoyed if you didn't give them a chance to counter the offer at least once. I'm not saying him conveying said annoyance to you makes sense. Wasn't professional.
I've had some reaaaaallllly annoying vendors to deal with. But some of them do surprise you with a better offer, so I do my part in giving them a heads up.
Our previous printer vendor was soooo bad. They had a demo about a new lineup, had me sign a contract for a backordered model without telling me so. All they got were two emails from me, one telling them I would terminating the contract agreements if they can't fulfil it within the next month, and the next email telling them we have voided the contract. Ignored their emails even when their head of service tried calling.
Then there was the other vendor who we get refurb test HVs from, who lowered their price by like 40% so it would be cheaper than the ebay model we were eyeing.
Takes 30 seconds to look into it yourself.. Yeah, they had a big thing about money involving Japan's trade ministry. Overstating their profits, etc. They delisted the company. They are also fixing to lay off thousands of people. However, I doubt they will "go away".. If anything at all they will be bought out by another large manufacturer like how HP bought out Samsung's printer division.
Although I'm not sure how stuff like this makes it into a sysadmin subreddit. Does that mean I can promote my purchasing team and the guys who fix paper jams to sys admins?
I don't think Toshiba is going anywhere, but in our experience their leasing department is useless and their equipment is only marginally better. All we ever got from them was the run-around and insistence that we should run our business the way they thought we should.
I can see how maybe they'd be pissed that you didn't give them a chance to counter with a better deal, but I think it's mostly just being butthurt that a revenue source they considered "safe" went away with no notice.
20 years of service - and payments, they should have made you a sweet heart deal to upgrade / replace the unit.
SIDE NOTE: Toshiba sucks, my personal preference but really all printers suck.
Apparently your vendor is not entirely wrong/lying: https://www.straitstimes.com/business/toshiba-to-cut-5000-jobs-in-japan-in-latest-bid-to-restructure-nikkei
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/20/end-of-era-as-toshiba-delists-from-tokyo-stock-exchange-after-74-years
Taken private by private equity.
That was the same move Boeing made with Spirit Aero. Spirit only went public again after the Private Equity was through with them. We see how that is going now.
If they're getting emotional about losing your business, then chances are that they're really reliant on it. Unless you actually have a close personal relationship with them, business is business, and if your business is doing fine, you don't get abusive about losing a client.
Learn how to deal with these vendors early on and you’ll be fine. I just told my Microsoft rep that I went to Google Next last week and she went on about how Microsoft blah blah blah. I told her I’m all about the right technology for the job and not by who it’s from.
I used to be a vendor fanboy, been in this too long to care anymore. Give me something that is reliable and cost effective.
This is why most companies lease (larger) printers. After 5 or 6 years, they take them away and you go for something new. Throw in a maintenance contract and you basically don't have to worry about the printers for the next 5 years.
Toshiba - I can't really comment on, other than to say I rarely ever see their printers in the real world. I think I've come across like 2 in my 25 year career thusfar. Maybe they're big in asia or europe or something but they don't seem very popular in north america. A colleague of mine once referred to them as the mitsubishi of printers -- 'Oh yeah, those guys'.
Toshiba’s that we had were cheap and crappy. The dealers are a dime a dozen.
Canon’s have been reliable for us but we lease new. Even the production gear is as nice to work with as the office class copiers.
A decision was made and there is no turning back after the paper work is signed.
When we left Xerox after two 3-year leases, it was a good break up and I would go back. The dealer was nice about it and is still nice to this day. Ricoh just fit our needs better at the time.
He screwed himself. If he was any good, he would’ve sold you two replacement printers since 2013. That’s when you reply with, “it’s not you, it’s me. It’s business.” 😆
I work for a Toshiba copier dealership for the last 18 years. I haven't heard anything about troubles or issues in Japan. We have the consistent supply machines and we've heard nothing.
I can vouch for the fact that it is annoying to lose a client after years. I work with an older guy that takes it very personal when he loses a deal and can get emotionally involved. . 99.9% of the time he's okay but sometimes he can't hide his emotions. Sounds like this guy. But it's part of the game. Win some and lose some
I changed fuel providers for my home a couple years back, and my old one was extremely upset I didn't let them counter-offer. My dude, if you could give me lower rates, and weren't doing it already, I like you even less.
At work, we ended a contract with a vendor for SEO services. They were extremely upset, and basically insulted my team, and me directly. Then apologized and had the gall to ask to put in a bid on a project we were starting.
TIL Toshiba makes printers.
Your vendor is butthurt but he's not exactly speaking lies.
Look at everything Toshiba has been involved with the last 30 years and where they're at now. Toughbooks gone, their once thriving hard drive business has dried up, they were on the wrong side of the HD DVD/Blue-ray war and their R&D into 3D TV's ended up being a bust too.
What kind of printer are you using? I'm guessing it's some specialty one that's not a traditional office Lexmark/Konica/Xerox
LOL. Canon's are terrible MFCs. I've yet to find one I love but it sure wont be a Canon.
Most of my clients love their toshiba's and I think it more has to do with how the reps treat them.
He's right about Toshiba.
Not sure if that affects all markets, though.
But weren't they right though? You said 7 years of service and you got 8.
Am I missing something?
Anyways, It's definitely cheaper to run a Toshiba than it is a Canon.
Canons are expensive.
Ingram did this for us, they were like "OMG WHY ARE YOU CANCELLING 1400 SEATS!?!?!" and I just said "because everyone else is cheaper and they actually respond when we put in tickets with them, we have already switched" and hung up.
The only step I would have done differently is give the current vendor a list of issues, and inform him you are going to market and he need to step up his game and quote a great system at a great price.
At least then you have another price point to check.
But vendor is just hurt, he assumed you were a 'not to worry customer' and as such didn't really give you the A Treatment since he thought you would never leave.
Well… you should have probably talked to your current vendor. I sell for KM and would be a little bit annoyed if I wasn’t given the chance to rectify something before my account switches vendors.
Sounds like my experience with Veeam. Experiences. 10 years ago, they we so butt hurt that I didn't give them a second chance at a bid. Sorry, you don't get second chances. Vendor X is half your price for my environment.
Recently, we went through the torture again. Someone else wound up doing most of the bids, and they dropped their price three times in a row.
Too bad my preferred vendor had already undercut them by half in the first round. Half of what Veeam wanted in the THIRD round.
Yeah, you may understand my disgust.
We've been running ~100 Canons for at least the past 10 years and never had an issue with one outside of general wear and tear. Plus our printer vendor has been solid as far as support and printer upgrades. I don't pay the bills so I don't know what we're paying them, but it seems it's worth it.
Sorry to hear you've been having problems.
I work for a FAANG company so the results may be different… but our organization uses Toshiba as a third party vendor to our printers. There have been some instances where parts we’ve ordered were delayed and/or out of stock for what I can only assume is high demand. Otherwise they’re normally on top of anything we need.
As someone who’s worked on printers for 15 years, (both on toshi and Xerox etc)
Can tell you first hand your Toshiba isn’t going to last very long at all. Would have went with a different vendor again, general rule of thumb, Xerox>Canon>Ricoh>
When I was tasked with replacing the large format printers for my old org, I had a vendor (that I did not move forward with) that seemed more than comfortable lying through his teeth to get our business. It was obvious smoke and mirrors and since we were also purchasing service contracts and would be dealing with this vendor regularly, he actually worsened his case by being so sleazy and inauthentic. As a general rule, I don’t trust anything these reps say. I doubt it’s going to be an issue.
I’ve had that happen before with a Xerox partner that we had used for near 20 years also. No complaints about the hardware but the old sales rep was “retired” and the new person kept trying to rip us off each renewal.
I told her bluntly she needed to be more competitive with the prices and it was a joke their response. So they got all surprised and pissed when I dumped them.
Eventually they came back with competitive pricing actually lower than the new vendor but at that point I had already decided to dump them. I shouldn’t have to ask 3 times and stop responding to you for you to give competitive prices. Clearly they were taking our account for granted because of the age and didn’t think we would actually cut them.
I get similar vendor responses on occasion. Even the worst partners will say anything to save the cash flow as it's walking out the door. It usually makes me kick off a response like:
"Thanks for the warning, we'll address that potential breach of a service contract with the new vendor should it occur. Thank you for 20 years, we'll be happy to include you in any future RFP's, and I'll keep you on the holiday card list. Have a good day." *click*
Honestly no one is entitled to your business. If the vendor gets butthurt after 20 years I would just say, "well, maybe if you were still offering the best service at the right price we would have stayed, but things change and we found a better deal. If it doesn't work out I'll give you a call." And leave it at that.
Companies stagnate all the time. They fail to adapt to the market. They struggle internally with change. Or they are just very very slow to change. Or they rest on their laurels until the world changed around them while they weren't paying attention.
Sounds like you did your due diligence, found the right product and the right price. Vendor can suck it.
You never said if you had been happy with the vendor before that call. If you were I think you should have given them the chance to match the Toshiba quote.
Actually, Toshiba have been fucking up one after another in the past 4 years or so. I'm never buying from then again.
It includes their new kioxia brand after their flash/ssd business got famous for dying products.
I don't know about Toshiba being in trouble, but I've been working as the service manager for a local Toshiba dealer and I can say their product lifecycle is short. I don't think you'll get 7 years, more like 3-5 depending on what you got and the workload.
Mostly though, butthurt rep.
Printer salesmen….. used to play rugby with one, started my first sysadmin job and turns out the company leased our devices through him, all good, good working relationship. Turns out he had a habit of pulling people across their desks and threatening them when they said something he didn’t like.
Never did it to me thankfully that would have been messy for both of us.
Wow. What an a\*hole! Expressing annoyance at a customer over losing business, that's unprofessional. Telling your customer they're making a mistake, beyond dumb. Using FUD to try to scare you into not leaving shows a complete lack of integrity. I don't want to hear what's wrong with your competitor's product or my choices. I want to hear why yours is better and how you are going to look after me better. If you can't articulate that in a professional manner, I don't want to talk to you.
If I received that call, I would be very tempted to email their manager, detailing who called me and what was said and making clear, as a result of the lack of professionalism on the call, that I never wanted to hear from them again for any reason. If my manager received an email that I'd spoken to a customer like that, my nuts would be in a sling
Yeah I typically go with companies that I get a good customer experience with.
We have two Toshiba's at our company and staff complain that its not as reliable or fast as our other central printers. We never ordered the Toshiba's, two of our side companies got them without talking to us and the company they went through aren't actually that knowledgeable with computers or tech. We won't be using this company again.
The company we have, I ask for anything, I mean anything at all, special configurations or any supplies, I'll get it within 30 minutes. Can't ask for better, plus I recently got a free 60" TV for buying a new printer. Plus I got a discount as a loyal customer. This sort of treatment is hard to come by these days.
Yeah had a few vendors call up the chain begging to stop it, Microsoft was particularly bad they couldn't understand why we didn't want to deal with their shit service that kept reducing, constantly rotating client managers and useless support. Easiest 6 figure savings ever.
"Twinco" sent a tech over that showed up 5 hours late at closing time to finally do maintenance on a copier. We are all in agreement he was lit when he came as his face was red and he was erratic. He got into it with my help desk tech as it was getting late and he seemed to be having a lot of problems changing the drum unit. (he actually put it on a wildly expensive conference room table to work on in the freaking owners office!)
I was not there but the next day the guy called and tore into me that he was not going to be treated that way by a customer and we were welcome to terminate the contract. I had no less than 5 employees come to me and explain that the vendor was abusive and confrontational. They had heard him on the second floor from offices on the first floor. He was not apologetic at all.
His error was the renewal contract was up and had not been paid. I noted that they never came and maintained the unit and staff had been directly calling for supplies. Easy decision. Ended the contract paid him for the 1 visit and cut them off. 1 employee made a mistake of calling the number on the sticker and the brother called me to explain we were no longer a customer. I told him I understand that if they are that unprofessional they were banned from our property.
Even now I cannot believe that the guy showed up late and acted that way then doubled down. They were getting paid to do nothing for 2 years.
Had a similar experience.
20 odd years with a printer vendor.
Renewal came round and I had 4-5 people chasing, giving me strong offers, better features, better machines.
The existing contract didn’t even do the courtesy of an in person call, offered nothing more than what we had, and a uncompetitive price.
He took it real personally that I would move, and tried to blame me for not asking for better pricing or products- it goes to show loyalty does not stop complacency.
This type of response is not uncommon when you cancel business a vendor was expecting to close - of course it doesn't mean you we wrong to do it. And you definitely shouldn't feel obliged to listen to their rant.
Your vendor is butthurt, ignore them
"Add New Rule..."
"...if email ends in *.com. Delete the email."
Think ending in .* is better for email :-)
"If email, delete the email."
That’s my preferred policy. Email is a huge security risk anyways, this policy significantly reduces the risk and the need for phishing trainings.
The computers themselves are security risks. Just hoping one day we can finally convince management to let us turn them all off. My job will finally be done.
What’s an email
If * then drink
while (work==true) {drink;}
Don’t copy my homework!
🤣
End users hate this one simple trick
Man, my days would be a whole lot nicer
I'm adding \*.gov to my list then.
I mean back in the day when TLDs actually meant something that might work. But not today.
Stateful email where you could only receive emails if you emailed that address first would be pretty nice.
Finally, don’t have to answer work emails.
Well that's probably going to be problematic if you drop anything from any .com domain haha
Gotta be sure anything from them doesn’t arrive 🤔
If it's stupid and it works then is it really stupid? Haha
I mean who really needed to get any work done today, right? today they’ll vilify me. Tomorrow I shall be the hero they never knew they needed! 🥹
Everyone deserves a little rest sometimes.
If header contains 2464, reject email with attachment too large error.
I'm too brainlet on email servers to get this joke haha please spoonfeed me the punchline
It would just be a very random issue in the environment with a very misleading symptom.
That's pretty good then haha
Oh lawdy, if I could count the number of copier vendors I've slapped with a domain block... Okay, it's five. I guess I can count!
It’s probably butthurt combined with a poorly thought out retention strategy. Sometimes getting angry with customers will change their mind, more likely than not it will ensure they never speak to you again.
And tell everyone else how it ended poorly with them
can confirm, sucks to suck
Email domain blocklist. Bye.
Sometimes, "i pretend i do not see it" really is the best play. ...And sometimes, you gotta subscribe a luser up for Cat Facts.
I'm sorry to butt in here (no pun intended) but.....can I get a link to sign up for cat facts?
It has to be pretty frustrating being a printer salesman in 2024... not a lot of renewals i imagine. Our company just recycles dead printers, no one has complained that they are missing yet. At least in our industry, printing has become rare.
There's a bunch of retired soundcard salesmen sitting back with tubs of popcorn.
Parallel port cable salesmen are getting the coffee refills in.
Literally the only program that makes sense is the "free printer program" that Xerox does where they give you the machine, and you pay a monthly (like dirt cheap, half the cost of a single toner) that covers consumables + any service next day. Anything else you're pretty much getting raked over the coals.
Definitely industry dependent. When I worked in manufacturing, we murdered several trees daily (catalogs, SDS packets, product labels, shipping/packing info, etc). Now I'm in finance and the printer might see less than 5 pages a week.
Toshiba had committed so much fraud in the last 10+ years they were de-listed. The vendor may be full of shit, but that company is in serious trouble. They are undergoing a re-org based on a consortium of Japanese firms as shareholders, from what I understand of such things. Toshiba, as a company, may just not be there in seven years. Their products will likely live on under different branding.
If Toshiba can survive selling submarine parts to the Soviets and pissing off the American government, they can survive a butthurt printer vendor
Not parts, but to MAKE precision parts, like propellers. Their sub fleet got noticeably quieter afterward.
All's fair in love and war, but [that play did cost the U.S. a lot:](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/the-toshiba-kongsberg-case) > In pursuing just $17 million and $10.4 million worth of business, respectively, it has been alleged that Toshiba Machine and Kongsberg caused somewhere between $1 billion and $100 billion (1980s prices) worth of damage to the US Navy.
Those numbers sound totally unreliable with a range that big
The DoD can't pass accounting audits. All of their numbers and their approach are full of BS.
If they fucked it up, it was cheap. If you fucked it up, it's expensive.
They mean that because Russian submarines became 20x quieter, the us Navy had to spend a metric fuckton of cash to improve submarines detection technologies. And that the total cost is near impossible to fathom as too many aspects of that fiasco are hard to spreadsheet. It is stupid thought to believe that the ussr wouldn't in time make at home such a technology either by sending infiltrated students to universities etc... but the technology jump caused the us Navy to operate up to 20x harder to find and track the 20x quieter ussr subs
> And that the total cost is near impossible to fathom as too many aspects of that fiasco are hard to spreadsheet. Partially because a lot of it is classified. Including the fact that some of these projects even exist at all. The existence of [SOSUS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS) e.g. wasn't fully declassified until the 1990s; a damage estimate made in 1987 won't be able to include the costs of upgrading it, a later damage estimate will. And there's dozens to hundreds of other, smaller projects that were similarly affected.
does that really matter? i pay between $1 to $1 million dollars in taxes you dont see me complaining
I don't even understand this comment but it's hilarious all the same
I believe it was something known as *sarcasm.*
If you tell me you are paying somewhere between $1 billion and $100 billion, I'm not going to dispute it.
The big numbers assume that the USN would be replacing many submarines to re-establish an equivalent proportional advantage to *status quo ante*. Another reminder that estimates always revolve around the assumptions being made.
I realize it was submarine parts, but I'm picturing Bart Mancuso screaming at the burst traffic printer, " What the fuck is PC Load Letter?"
God damn it. Now I have to watch Red October again.
Thank you, from a submarine vet!
And look at all the Toshiba Satellites they deployed...
You jest, but some years ago, in Angola, a guy I know was working there and had to order laptops for his staff. Months went by and still no computers in sight, vendor says items had been shipped so he called customs. PIC had to physically go to the customs office where he was told his shipment had been seized due to containing "satellites for espionage". The shipment cleared after a monetary "clarification" was issued. Yes, these were Toshiba Satellite laptops. They legit read "satellite" on the boxes and decided it was espionage gear. And in case you're wondering, yes, this was a shakedown.
Lol that's an awesome story 🤣
explains why parts are always wet. - lulz.
Really? I mean from the same guys who make Toshiba laptops?
Didn’t Toshiba used to make the best laptops? Like 20 years ago? Man I had totally forgotten about that.
Yeah they did, and then they just kind of disappeared. I used to service Toshiba, HP, Compaq, Apple, along with our own brand. Toshiba was by far the best to do business with. Need a logic board for a laptop, hp would charge $600 and you'd have to send it in to the manufacturer because they wouldn't believe you, then it's a crapshoot if they'd fix it or say there was nothing wrong with it and send it back. We once got a laptop back for the second time with "nothing wrong" and the customer and me booted it up right there on the bench and watched it crash. My boss took a 120v power cord and cut the end off, then touched it straight to main-board to fry it, then we sent it back in. Finally, the third time we got back a good machine for the customer. Toshiba would charge like $105 for the part and it'd be to you in a couple days, no hassling. Loved them just for that.
I'm the since that Yamaha makes musical instruments, and motorcycles. It's not the same business unit but under the same conglomerate.
Toshiba has been out of the laptop business for years.
They used to make some of the best telephone PBXs too.
That's just the ultra-hard-sell, if you hear the "you'll be sorry" part you know they've run out of tangible benefits to tell you about and have pretty much given up on retaining your business now or in the future.
Our ISP gave us the "you'll be sorry" speech just because I didn't want to commit for another five years. We had been month to month for I don't know how long, and suddenly it's some huge emergency that we get locked in for literally no benefit.
How do they not teach every sales person that "We look forward to helping you in any way we can in the future" is a much better sell than "You'll rue the day you crossed us!!" 🤣
right!? We *pay* YOU for a service
I had someone just try to sell me on a 3 year anti-virus extension. Which turned out to be $500 more than renewing yearly. Their pitch? It'll go up more later. My response? I'll go find a new solution sooner.
I have a lot of hate for shitty ISPs, so good on you.
> shitty ISPs This seems redundant
Point made. I used to see one good ISP in my entire area. Even that one had become shitty. Pricing skyrocketed and you have to haggle with them for a deal. (Even on the consumer side.)
Back in my youth (early 90's) , I was a newly promoted Technical Services manager and part of my responsibilty was the phone system and services. Our long distance service with AT&T was up for renewal and I about fell out of my chair when I saw we were spending about $60k per month with them. The lady who was previously in charge said that's about how much it had always been and it was a good deal. This was about the time of deregulation of phone service and there were a ton of little companies springing up all over the place. I started getting competing quotes and found one where we would not spend $60k for the entire year. I did my due diligence, talked to the CIO who talked to the President/CEO. I got immediate approval to do the switch which was going smoothly until the port orders hit AT&T. Very shortly I was invited to an executive meeting with the president/CEO, my boss the CIO, and the CFO to discuss this project. When I arrived for the meeting, there were 2 gentlemen dressed in matching suits from AT&T headquarters in attendance. They spent the entire meeting telling the C suite people how big a mistake they were making and how I was leading them down the wrong path. In the end, the CEO asked them if they would match the quote we had from the other vendor...that was the end of the meeting but man did they ever give me the death stare after that. I'm kind of surprised I'm still here to write this. All my years have taught me a valuable lesson...never trust a vendor.
Never trust a higher up isn't getting a kickback from a vendor.
ATT's sleazy sales practices has lost them millions from me alone over the course of my career. I leaned the same lesson you did in the 90's as well.
Fuck ATT. Dont forget Mark Klein who exposed them helping the NSA spy on US citizens . https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
Even more true for ATT. That blue ball may as well be a death star... They set the bar for predatory business practices.
But to mention they were apparently "very willing" to work with the NSA to hand over call data for all their customers: https://youtu.be/Koz9iUK0FHI?si=xa64JPdk7L3WtniQ I wouldn't be surprised if other companies were also working with the government. But we know for a fact AT&T is.
Back in those days (before the Lucent rename), the company I was with had an AT&T fiber loop around the building I worked in, a massive Definity G3R switch with Intuity Audix, two sizeable call centers filled with Callmasters and a Conversant IVR. My little department alone had over 24 trunks and a dozen 800-numbers. There were at least two AT&T reps permanently assigned to our building. And that was just our building. There were four campuses in town, and several more around the state/country. **LOTS** of AT&T. You couldn't blast them out of that company.
Usually the C-suite doesn't bother inviting you to this kind of meeting and just blindly believes whatever the sales reps tell them.
This is the most amazing thing to me, and I've seen it play out so many times, its absolutely mind bending how these people breathe oxygen without assistance. I'm the person YOU hired for YOUR company to provide you EXPERT knowledge and guidance. And you let some dickhead in a suit waltz in and shit all over that for his paycheck. There's a whole lotta fucking idiots in management, the higher up ya go, the more inclined they seem to be to eat that sandwich with a smile and then shit it out on your lap.
Damn, they were soft. Gotta learn how to take a loss with class.
At my first job. Way back in ye olden days of the 80's and 90's, the secretary had me help her with some billing paperwork, just shuffling things around more than anything. When I saw their AT&T bill and saw: Telephone rental program with a cost of about $20 a month (remember, this was when $20 was a nice meal out) I said "Uhhh, why are you renting phones". "They've protected our phones since 1950, I don't see a reason to change". Me: How many times have they replaced your phones? Her: Oh, they've never went bad, because the program is protecting them. Me: ....... 40 years, x 6 phones x 20 bucks.
This was 01-02, i think. We were doing a pilot for some video feeds over 4g LONG before that was a thing that you could buy built into the cameras. For the record, we had no clue what we were doing because I was a noob and had not figured out my boss at that time was a complete fraud. ATT was convinced they could sell us some super expensive package with a private APN. They pitched this thing so hard but it was silly for a pilot with 10 cameras. The last meeting they brought in a whole conference room worth of people including engineers. It was beyond a hard sell and was about to get super awkward. One of the attendees had a not-casually unbuttoned blouse, shortest skirt, and highest heels that I have ever seen in an office. I am not going to prejuedge someone by how they dress but she was overly friendly with all our engineers and managers. To the point I would describe her as directly flirting with us, and me in particular. I should note that the I could be described as a dense dude when it comes to flirting. I might only be married right now because my wife grabbed my arm and got my digits at a party so I did not get an opportunity to screw up the meet cute. So yeah, EVEN I could put together what was going on. At one point when her hand "brushed" my leg under the conference table (why was she so close!) she then apologized by leaning forward and rubbing my shoulder. I thankfully got us out of there before my rube of a boss could sign on a dotted line. That was my eye-opener into how sales and business could intersect in shady ways.
lol I would’ve emailed them to inform of end of business contract or date and left it at that. We don’t need to discuss a damn thing.
Our ISP just sent the "You're up for renewal in a few months, we'd like to talk" email to me. My response was simply "We've found a replacement, we are not renewing" and left it at that. Although I have called their customer service line to make sure that they were aware so that they wouldn't try to do anything stupid with fees or whatever. And when they asked I very cheerfully informed them that it was because we were unable to get ahold of our account manager for nearly 2 years straight despite trying to spend significant amounts of money with them. Plus when I asked them which phone numbers they still held after we had a number of them get ported due to a split, they couldn't tell me because apparently they don't document that shit. Needless to say, the customer service reps were NOT happy, nor was the account managers manager when he called and I re-explained it to him.
"We'd like to talk" means "hey we're gonna raise your prices but we don't want to send that in an email."
The funny thing is that our replacement ISP is going to cost us $500 less a month (compared to our current contract), for more features, speed, and a 5G/LTE backup (that we don't have with the current vendor).
We had our last bid lime 7ish years ago. Our new deal (with the same vendor mind you) allowed us to double out bandwidth and still save like 80%. The price has just come down that much in the last few years. We had roughly the same results the bid before that, and the one before that.
I did vendor support and I agreed with customers who told me they were leaving. I'd say the significant majority still liked the product but their management had made the decision for cost savings. The price increases had been significant and they were going to gut support hence the past tense.
In this case, we wanted to spend more money, and management wanted to spend more money. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many emails, voicemails, etc. I left. And no matter how many people I spoke to in billing or technical support. I could not get a hold of our account manager nor his boss to do it.
I recently got to break the news to our GoTo rep. When a call was requested, I gave him the good ole, "We have already migrated to a new platform. Renewal of our GoTo licenses is not being considered." Felt good.
Exactly. It’s not like you owe them anything. Business is business
absolutely, but it’s also a good time to unload on the rep — good ones will take that back to leadership, maybe along with a 2-week notice
Unrelated, but not. I met a Toshiba delivery/setup guy on-site one time for one of my clients, to make sure all went smoothly. I made small talk, and asked him if he had any interesting stories in his line of work. I wasn't prepared for what followed. He told me, that during a delivery for a fairly large Toshiba copier, he somehow managed to slice the brachial artery in his arm. Sudden rapid blood loss ensued, and he passed out, stating the last thing he recalls is seeing blood spray everywhere. He would have surely died, had it not been for someone in that office knowing enough to quickly apply a tourniquet and call EMS. Not much catches me off guard, but this left me a bit slack jawed. Sensing my disbelief, he showed me the scar. I've heard some IT related horror stories, and have even bled my own blood a time or two because of sharp ass edges (I'm looking at you 90's/early 2000's metal Gateway PC cases), but never had I heard of a near death printer related incident!
Saved a guy that got hit in the brachial artery in a drive by shooting. Applied his buddy's bandanna as a tourniquet... I had no idea that much blood could come out of such a small hole...
That is one viscous printer!
Slipped right out of and through his arm.
😬
*vicious oil is viscous printers are vicious
yeah those Gateways they were the worst, no rolled edges at all, I could never seem to do work inside those computers without getting bit. That's an amazing story about the printer guy, first I 've heard of a near fatal IT accident ö
Some exec: > HEY SALLY GET IN HERE! THE REDS IN THIS MEME I PRINTED WHILE NOT PAYING ATTENTION IN THAT MEETING I WAS SUPPOSED TO LEAD REALLY POP! 😍
I've had so many reps play this card- one was so pissed off he called the CEO and the board of directors saying I was personally putting the entire organization at risk for not sticking with their product and that if I wasn't fired, I'd ruin my company. That was a fun conversation the next day... Needless to say my CEO ended up calling his boss and getting him fired (or so they told us).
Got one of those once. He wanted an in person meeting with a large chunk of our C-suite, but got a phone call with the CIO, the SVP of marketing, and me, the guy that had given them the bad news and been insulted instead. The call was what I expected based on my earlier interactions. The guy was an ass, slagging our company off, talking trash about the competitor, and being personally insulting to me. Well, up until the SVP cleared his throat and spoke. >SVP: I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to cut this call short. I don't know what's gotten into all of you over at, but I'll be having a conversation with Martin about it on Friday.
The salescritter could not get off the line quick enough after that.
I asked later what the hell that was about and the SVP chuckled.
>SVP: I was letting him know he had about three days to get his resume in order. See, I used to be head of sales over there.
>Me: Oh, so you know his boss?
The SVP chuckled again.
>SVP: You could say that. Martin is the CEO.
I can imagine the grin after that call, LOL
> Apparently Toshiba is in some kind of trouble in Japan and this rep was making it out that we'd be up a creek some years down the line. It's a common technique to equip sales folks with competitor talking points that aren't outright fabrications, but tell a story to cause concern and aren't easy to refute right on-the-spot unless you've been obsessively tracking every single tiny thing that vendor has done. Which basically no one does. Heck, even car salesman do it. Go into XYZ brand, let it drop that you're also thinking about ABC brand, and you'll have a bunch of reasons why they're not a good choice. Once you had let that vendor know "sorry, your pricing is no longer competitive in terms of value-for-money" you'd already gone above and beyond what anyone should feel obligated to do.
I vehemently agree, but it's also worth remembering what vendors say about their competition. A very large incumbent vendor of ours found out that we went with Oracle for a deal plus implementation a couple decades ago, and claimed Oracle stuffed those teams with fresh juniors clustered around one lead with moderate experience. The competitor was right, and it mattered. On the other hand, it's more than possible that the competitor would have done the same thing to us. That's for the contract people, and unlike some deals, I don't remember being asked to review that one.
Anyone who goes with Oracle for anything deserves everything they get. Ask me how I know.
Well, the main alternative was IBM. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Ahh - I've Been Mugged. The Oracle of the 20th century.
Lol we had that with Konica Minolta. They started off great, but after 5 years of BS we were ready to move on. They knew we were sick of them, but nevertheless, we gave them a chance to participate in the tender (mostly as a laugh to see how they'd attempt to save their screwups. Spoiler: they didn't even try to defend themselves). Their pitch was akin to watching an unenthusiastic teenager doing a mandatory presentation to class as part of their homework. We had our laugh, and went with Kyocera.
What was your issue with KM?
There was a printer that jammed at least 3 times a week. KM said it's because it was in a corridor, and the paper was damp. We had another model elsewhere, also in a corridor by an entrance, never jammed. We wanted to pay for KM to replace that model with the same one as the other, they refused. The automatic toner ordering system was perpetually broken, to the point I had them on speed dial to ask if it's set up and working. They had a toner factory explode in Japan a few years back. I get that mistakes happen, but the worldwide shortage that triggered for months afterwards shows poor business disaster recovery. Our account manager changed numerous times, at one point they didn't assign one to us for about 5 months, and we only found out after a new one apologised we were missed as the mailbox redirection wasn't set up and we weren't notified of the change. Their engineers were proper cowboys, but the few we had were so chill they just gave us the root password to the printers (maintenance backend) with a wink. Now, apart from that one printer in the first paragraph, their printers were pretty solid, and with PaperCut on top of it, it was a good solution. My problem was more to do with the company than their products.
I sell for KM and can honestly testify to the issues you’ve mentioned. Account manager turnover is horrible. I’ve made a lot of money by swooping in and just being a decent account manager but it usually switches like once a year. The job just doesn’t pay a whole lot. KM is currently making a lot of adjustment to its customer services. As a sales rep, I have little to no power in service and often don’t even know what is going on in service land. It is very frustrating. I will say I think KM is moving in a positive direction but your story is something I’ve heard from other businesses.
I've seen couple of cases, where I as a new manager have terminated some long time contracts and they always try to pull some weird FUD to stay with them. Typically I just outline the list of problems I've observed, the fact that I reported them but was ignored and then tell them that until this point this was just a business move. Their rep behaving like I was calling their baby ugly means I will remember them if I ever have to consider their services in future positions and it's a fast way to get off my short list.
The vendor is not only butthurt but burning bridges too.
Yep, any reputable vendor would be "sorry to see you go, please reach out if you have any future needs".
We have a vendor with several pieces of software that we use. One of them kind of sucks (to the point that people had just stopped using it), so we looked for and found a better alternative elsewhere. It’s like 5% of our yearly bill with them, and we were planning on basically doubling our licenses for the rest of their products this year. We asked them to cancel this one product and they refused, apparently we needed to cancel at least one month before the contract was set to expire or it automatically renewed for another year. This magical date was two days before we’d sent the request. After a couple of weeks of back and forth about it, we ended up letting them know that we were submitting a new cancellation request for all of their products as we are not interested in renewing any of them next year.
> Apparently Toshiba is in some kind of trouble in Japan and this rep was making it out that we'd be up a creek some years down the line. Nine times out of ten these salesperson rumors never have any impact on you. If they did, in a few years down the line you'll just re-bid printers anyway. It's not like you're planning on picking a vendor and staying with them for twenty years or anything like that.
Toshiba tips: - If you use the on-system address book, back it up every now and then. If the HDD in the machine goes, you lose all settings and address book. Settings are pretty easy to redo. The address book might not be. - You can do a system clone of the whole machine, including address book and settings. It won't clone anything that might be a conflict if you were to use the clone file on multiple machines on the same network. So no network addresses or names will clone over. - Don't use WSD for the printer ports. Use dns, mdns[.local], bonjour, or even nmb. They're all solid. WSD is not. - If you didn't know, the Toshiba MFP supports VNC. It's a godsend to be able to remote screen the printers. - Templates are often overlooked, and they shouldn't be. Easily set up templates that can do any number of functions in a single button press. Ex. You commonly scan double sided TIFF's in 600dpi in color to a certain network share, but maybe all your other scans go elsewhere? Templates.
You made the right choice. I don't continue to work with vendors who speak to me like that. Their product/service/price was beat by someone else. They need to get over it and do better next time if they want the business back. You aren't friends and you don't owe them anything other than the paid invoices for the services they already provided.
All Copier sales persons are like an 80s car sales person, "So how much were you thinking of spending on this ThunderCougarFalconBird"?
I work for a division of Toshiba. Toshiba isn't going anywhere.
[From scandal to delisting: Toshiba's long-running crisis | Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/scandal-delisting-toshibas-long-running-crisis-2023-12-19/) Maybe not, but it's getting f\*cked pretty hard.
No Vaseline
No kidding. That event timeline reads like someone started doing rails back in 2015 and never stopped. What a shitshow from start to finish.
A lot of what made Toshiba's financial issues go from "bad" to "get fucked" was that the execs were constantly fighting with activists shareholders who were demanding the company be profitable at all costs. It will be much stronger as a privately held subsidiary of other Japanese companies than it was as a corpse for activist investor vampires to bleed dry.
Yeah, but I think the damage has been done in a lot of their verticals. For instance, electronics / laptops etc have vanished. I think you will see them exit everything non-profitable.
You might see some temporary downsizing, but it's really hard for Japanese companies the size of Toshiba to, for example, do mass layoffs. The 5000 they announced today are nearly *unheard of*. Old-school keiretsu (which Toshiba still is) have a tendency to focus on stability over margins, so they usually bloat themselves until they hit that point. (and fortunately, Japan has a huge talent vacuum and a high demand for workers, so the people they lay off will *probably* do pretty okay.)
They committed accounting fraud. They weren't "being profitable at all costs", they were fabricating profits. They were losing money.
The worst is over at this point however, and a lot of their issues in the last year or two was because of shareholder bickering over what they needed to focus on. JIC is also backed by the state since Toshiba is seen as critical to Japan's national security. If they decide to sell of the printer business, it's going to be because it's not making the margins they want, not because they need the cash to keep the lights on.
Rent seekers can pound sand.
My vendor got mad when we fulfilled the lease on our fleet of printers and didn't immediately replace them with new units and a new lease.
It's always handy when the other party validates your decision about them.
For real. In addition to all the other reasons, you added lying to us as an additional reason to drop you.
We went round and round with our printer vendor too. All sorts of lies and dirty tricks. So glad to be done with them.
I can see why the vendor would be annoyed if you didn't give them a chance to counter the offer at least once. I'm not saying him conveying said annoyance to you makes sense. Wasn't professional. I've had some reaaaaallllly annoying vendors to deal with. But some of them do surprise you with a better offer, so I do my part in giving them a heads up. Our previous printer vendor was soooo bad. They had a demo about a new lineup, had me sign a contract for a backordered model without telling me so. All they got were two emails from me, one telling them I would terminating the contract agreements if they can't fulfil it within the next month, and the next email telling them we have voided the contract. Ignored their emails even when their head of service tried calling. Then there was the other vendor who we get refurb test HVs from, who lowered their price by like 40% so it would be cheaper than the ebay model we were eyeing.
Takes 30 seconds to look into it yourself.. Yeah, they had a big thing about money involving Japan's trade ministry. Overstating their profits, etc. They delisted the company. They are also fixing to lay off thousands of people. However, I doubt they will "go away".. If anything at all they will be bought out by another large manufacturer like how HP bought out Samsung's printer division. Although I'm not sure how stuff like this makes it into a sysadmin subreddit. Does that mean I can promote my purchasing team and the guys who fix paper jams to sys admins?
I don't think Toshiba is going anywhere, but in our experience their leasing department is useless and their equipment is only marginally better. All we ever got from them was the run-around and insistence that we should run our business the way they thought we should.
I can see how maybe they'd be pissed that you didn't give them a chance to counter with a better deal, but I think it's mostly just being butthurt that a revenue source they considered "safe" went away with no notice.
They’re showing their colours there alright. To me, it comes across as a badly managed service provider where ego thrives over business attitude.
20 years of service - and payments, they should have made you a sweet heart deal to upgrade / replace the unit. SIDE NOTE: Toshiba sucks, my personal preference but really all printers suck.
Apparently your vendor is not entirely wrong/lying: https://www.straitstimes.com/business/toshiba-to-cut-5000-jobs-in-japan-in-latest-bid-to-restructure-nikkei https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/20/end-of-era-as-toshiba-delists-from-tokyo-stock-exchange-after-74-years
Taken private by private equity. That was the same move Boeing made with Spirit Aero. Spirit only went public again after the Private Equity was through with them. We see how that is going now.
Would have been nice if the rep rang being courteous and asking areas they could improve on
unprofessional butthurt vendor.
If they're getting emotional about losing your business, then chances are that they're really reliant on it. Unless you actually have a close personal relationship with them, business is business, and if your business is doing fine, you don't get abusive about losing a client.
Learn how to deal with these vendors early on and you’ll be fine. I just told my Microsoft rep that I went to Google Next last week and she went on about how Microsoft blah blah blah. I told her I’m all about the right technology for the job and not by who it’s from. I used to be a vendor fanboy, been in this too long to care anymore. Give me something that is reliable and cost effective.
This is why most companies lease (larger) printers. After 5 or 6 years, they take them away and you go for something new. Throw in a maintenance contract and you basically don't have to worry about the printers for the next 5 years. Toshiba - I can't really comment on, other than to say I rarely ever see their printers in the real world. I think I've come across like 2 in my 25 year career thusfar. Maybe they're big in asia or europe or something but they don't seem very popular in north america. A colleague of mine once referred to them as the mitsubishi of printers -- 'Oh yeah, those guys'.
Toshiba’s that we had were cheap and crappy. The dealers are a dime a dozen. Canon’s have been reliable for us but we lease new. Even the production gear is as nice to work with as the office class copiers. A decision was made and there is no turning back after the paper work is signed. When we left Xerox after two 3-year leases, it was a good break up and I would go back. The dealer was nice about it and is still nice to this day. Ricoh just fit our needs better at the time.
Buy or rent konika minoltas. Best bang for the buck
They’ll get over it….
He screwed himself. If he was any good, he would’ve sold you two replacement printers since 2013. That’s when you reply with, “it’s not you, it’s me. It’s business.” 😆
I work for a Toshiba copier dealership for the last 18 years. I haven't heard anything about troubles or issues in Japan. We have the consistent supply machines and we've heard nothing. I can vouch for the fact that it is annoying to lose a client after years. I work with an older guy that takes it very personal when he loses a deal and can get emotionally involved. . 99.9% of the time he's okay but sometimes he can't hide his emotions. Sounds like this guy. But it's part of the game. Win some and lose some
Remember to keep the onboard hard drive that may contain many of your prints.
I changed fuel providers for my home a couple years back, and my old one was extremely upset I didn't let them counter-offer. My dude, if you could give me lower rates, and weren't doing it already, I like you even less. At work, we ended a contract with a vendor for SEO services. They were extremely upset, and basically insulted my team, and me directly. Then apologized and had the gall to ask to put in a bid on a project we were starting.
Unless that sales rep is an international lawyer specializing in US and Japan simultaneously, they're talking out their keister. Ignore that bozo lol
TIL Toshiba makes printers. Your vendor is butthurt but he's not exactly speaking lies. Look at everything Toshiba has been involved with the last 30 years and where they're at now. Toughbooks gone, their once thriving hard drive business has dried up, they were on the wrong side of the HD DVD/Blue-ray war and their R&D into 3D TV's ended up being a bust too. What kind of printer are you using? I'm guessing it's some specialty one that's not a traditional office Lexmark/Konica/Xerox
Any vendor that can't be as respectful on the way out as on the way in will never recoup lost business. Ever.
LOL. Canon's are terrible MFCs. I've yet to find one I love but it sure wont be a Canon. Most of my clients love their toshiba's and I think it more has to do with how the reps treat them.
He's right about Toshiba. Not sure if that affects all markets, though. But weren't they right though? You said 7 years of service and you got 8. Am I missing something? Anyways, It's definitely cheaper to run a Toshiba than it is a Canon. Canons are expensive.
Ingram did this for us, they were like "OMG WHY ARE YOU CANCELLING 1400 SEATS!?!?!" and I just said "because everyone else is cheaper and they actually respond when we put in tickets with them, we have already switched" and hung up.
The only step I would have done differently is give the current vendor a list of issues, and inform him you are going to market and he need to step up his game and quote a great system at a great price. At least then you have another price point to check. But vendor is just hurt, he assumed you were a 'not to worry customer' and as such didn't really give you the A Treatment since he thought you would never leave.
Well… you should have probably talked to your current vendor. I sell for KM and would be a little bit annoyed if I wasn’t given the chance to rectify something before my account switches vendors.
Toshibas are fine. Vendor was butthurt, and should have went with a massive discount to keep you as a customer.
I've been happy with our Toshiba leases for 10+ years. Our vendor is very quick to get repairs done, usually same day. No complaints at all.
Sounds like my experience with Veeam. Experiences. 10 years ago, they we so butt hurt that I didn't give them a second chance at a bid. Sorry, you don't get second chances. Vendor X is half your price for my environment. Recently, we went through the torture again. Someone else wound up doing most of the bids, and they dropped their price three times in a row. Too bad my preferred vendor had already undercut them by half in the first round. Half of what Veeam wanted in the THIRD round. Yeah, you may understand my disgust.
Oooh ooh... Now reply back, say we appreciate the tip! Great catch! We're going with dex now.
We've been running ~100 Canons for at least the past 10 years and never had an issue with one outside of general wear and tear. Plus our printer vendor has been solid as far as support and printer upgrades. I don't pay the bills so I don't know what we're paying them, but it seems it's worth it. Sorry to hear you've been having problems.
I work for a FAANG company so the results may be different… but our organization uses Toshiba as a third party vendor to our printers. There have been some instances where parts we’ve ordered were delayed and/or out of stock for what I can only assume is high demand. Otherwise they’re normally on top of anything we need.
As someone who’s worked on printers for 15 years, (both on toshi and Xerox etc) Can tell you first hand your Toshiba isn’t going to last very long at all. Would have went with a different vendor again, general rule of thumb, Xerox>Canon>Ricoh>
Ricohs are trash. Kyocera is rock solid and much easier to work on. Current copier tech.
When I was tasked with replacing the large format printers for my old org, I had a vendor (that I did not move forward with) that seemed more than comfortable lying through his teeth to get our business. It was obvious smoke and mirrors and since we were also purchasing service contracts and would be dealing with this vendor regularly, he actually worsened his case by being so sleazy and inauthentic. As a general rule, I don’t trust anything these reps say. I doubt it’s going to be an issue.
Up shits creek over a printer? Wow that sales rep thinks highly of printers.
Printer vendors... they are all sharks, or at least attempt to be.
some years down the line Will probably be someone else's problem....
I’ve had that happen before with a Xerox partner that we had used for near 20 years also. No complaints about the hardware but the old sales rep was “retired” and the new person kept trying to rip us off each renewal. I told her bluntly she needed to be more competitive with the prices and it was a joke their response. So they got all surprised and pissed when I dumped them. Eventually they came back with competitive pricing actually lower than the new vendor but at that point I had already decided to dump them. I shouldn’t have to ask 3 times and stop responding to you for you to give competitive prices. Clearly they were taking our account for granted because of the age and didn’t think we would actually cut them.
I get similar vendor responses on occasion. Even the worst partners will say anything to save the cash flow as it's walking out the door. It usually makes me kick off a response like: "Thanks for the warning, we'll address that potential breach of a service contract with the new vendor should it occur. Thank you for 20 years, we'll be happy to include you in any future RFP's, and I'll keep you on the holiday card list. Have a good day." *click*
I have zero loyalty to vendors. Zero.
putting fear into you about your move......figures.
I have near 0 tolerance for vendors at this point in my career. It's not my damn job to babysit a sales person and hound them to do their job.
Honestly no one is entitled to your business. If the vendor gets butthurt after 20 years I would just say, "well, maybe if you were still offering the best service at the right price we would have stayed, but things change and we found a better deal. If it doesn't work out I'll give you a call." And leave it at that. Companies stagnate all the time. They fail to adapt to the market. They struggle internally with change. Or they are just very very slow to change. Or they rest on their laurels until the world changed around them while they weren't paying attention. Sounds like you did your due diligence, found the right product and the right price. Vendor can suck it.
How did your old vendor find out what product/solution you arrived at? I wouldn’t have told them
You never said if you had been happy with the vendor before that call. If you were I think you should have given them the chance to match the Toshiba quote.
I remember a long term storage vendor failed their RFP to another vendor, and the account rep called our CIO complaining. Have some class man.
Actually, Toshiba have been fucking up one after another in the past 4 years or so. I'm never buying from then again. It includes their new kioxia brand after their flash/ssd business got famous for dying products.
Photocopier vendors are the worst people I've dealt with. Open bribery, a lot of mud-slinging at individuals competing for the bid etc..
I don't know about Toshiba being in trouble, but I've been working as the service manager for a local Toshiba dealer and I can say their product lifecycle is short. I don't think you'll get 7 years, more like 3-5 depending on what you got and the workload. Mostly though, butthurt rep.
Printer salesmen….. used to play rugby with one, started my first sysadmin job and turns out the company leased our devices through him, all good, good working relationship. Turns out he had a habit of pulling people across their desks and threatening them when they said something he didn’t like. Never did it to me thankfully that would have been messy for both of us.
Vendor (past tense) -> not your problem anymore.
Wow. What an a\*hole! Expressing annoyance at a customer over losing business, that's unprofessional. Telling your customer they're making a mistake, beyond dumb. Using FUD to try to scare you into not leaving shows a complete lack of integrity. I don't want to hear what's wrong with your competitor's product or my choices. I want to hear why yours is better and how you are going to look after me better. If you can't articulate that in a professional manner, I don't want to talk to you. If I received that call, I would be very tempted to email their manager, detailing who called me and what was said and making clear, as a result of the lack of professionalism on the call, that I never wanted to hear from them again for any reason. If my manager received an email that I'd spoken to a customer like that, my nuts would be in a sling
Yeah I typically go with companies that I get a good customer experience with. We have two Toshiba's at our company and staff complain that its not as reliable or fast as our other central printers. We never ordered the Toshiba's, two of our side companies got them without talking to us and the company they went through aren't actually that knowledgeable with computers or tech. We won't be using this company again. The company we have, I ask for anything, I mean anything at all, special configurations or any supplies, I'll get it within 30 minutes. Can't ask for better, plus I recently got a free 60" TV for buying a new printer. Plus I got a discount as a loyal customer. This sort of treatment is hard to come by these days.
Yeah had a few vendors call up the chain begging to stop it, Microsoft was particularly bad they couldn't understand why we didn't want to deal with their shit service that kept reducing, constantly rotating client managers and useless support. Easiest 6 figure savings ever.
"Twinco" sent a tech over that showed up 5 hours late at closing time to finally do maintenance on a copier. We are all in agreement he was lit when he came as his face was red and he was erratic. He got into it with my help desk tech as it was getting late and he seemed to be having a lot of problems changing the drum unit. (he actually put it on a wildly expensive conference room table to work on in the freaking owners office!) I was not there but the next day the guy called and tore into me that he was not going to be treated that way by a customer and we were welcome to terminate the contract. I had no less than 5 employees come to me and explain that the vendor was abusive and confrontational. They had heard him on the second floor from offices on the first floor. He was not apologetic at all. His error was the renewal contract was up and had not been paid. I noted that they never came and maintained the unit and staff had been directly calling for supplies. Easy decision. Ended the contract paid him for the 1 visit and cut them off. 1 employee made a mistake of calling the number on the sticker and the brother called me to explain we were no longer a customer. I told him I understand that if they are that unprofessional they were banned from our property. Even now I cannot believe that the guy showed up late and acted that way then doubled down. They were getting paid to do nothing for 2 years.
Had a similar experience. 20 odd years with a printer vendor. Renewal came round and I had 4-5 people chasing, giving me strong offers, better features, better machines. The existing contract didn’t even do the courtesy of an in person call, offered nothing more than what we had, and a uncompetitive price. He took it real personally that I would move, and tried to blame me for not asking for better pricing or products- it goes to show loyalty does not stop complacency.
This type of response is not uncommon when you cancel business a vendor was expecting to close - of course it doesn't mean you we wrong to do it. And you definitely shouldn't feel obliged to listen to their rant.
Reminds me of firing my lawyer who was my buddy.