Why cows can fly! Believe it or not …

A colleague of mine, Murilo from Oracle Brasil talked about our roles at Oracle (but this applies to any other software company in the market I’d guess).

Do you believe in flying cows?

• Sales
  In Sales you’ll sell a customer that cows can fly
• Presales
  The presales consultant will have to do a presentation showing the ROI, TCO and KPIs of flying cows. She or he may have also a screenshot demo in Powerpoint showing flying cows.
• Consulting
  The consultant is the person to install the flying-cow piece of software at the customer site and embedd it into the customer’s environment. Unfortunately the poor consultant finds out that in this environment cows actually don’t fly well. In fact, cows don’t fly at all. So the consultant may raise an SR before going home.
• Support
  The SR gets into the queue of a Support engineer somewhere in the world. The Support engineer wonders about this SR as she or he has never heard of flying cows before. So she/he takes a look into the doc. And there’s nothing mentioned about flying cows. But the doc doesn’t say anything about “cows can’t fly” so a testcase will be required from the customer or the consultant to show the non-flying cows. Poor Support engineer: she/he can’t even file a bug for it as the doc doesn’t say anything about the flying-cow-feature.

Guess how that story will end?
Does it sound familiar to you? To me it does … a bit 😉
And I’m glad that I’m working in Development 🙂

So you may watch this tiny little video in your spare time …

-Mike

PS: Thanks to Murilo – and I phrased it in my own words as I still burst out laughing and crying at the same time when thinking about our conversation 🙂 But credits go to him – obgrigado!!!

PPS: No offense to anybody in any role in a software company …