My experience with most corporate vendors is that they are 90% hype, old-boy-network, shmoozing, or a "safe bet". In general I'd rather use an Apple product than a more mainstream corporate vendor product, assuming they're solving the same need.

So my apologies, I'd mis-interpreted your post.

I will however take issue with the veracity of this: "But that _doesn't_ cut it in most corporate environments. If you've told me X is going to do Y, it sure as hell better do Y or there's 10 other vendors waiting to replace you."

I can't tell you how many times I've seen vendors who have caused week long delays, production system outages, failed uptimes, breech of contract, unreliable hardware (not just a single box, but an entire line), buggy software, and the consequences are.... an apology on a con-call. "Oh we can't replace them, it's a corporate standard" or "well, our contract with them is another 3 years, so..." or "replacing their system would cause too much disruption". I've seen a totally useless, misleading, etc... vendor replaced just once in 10 years in enterprise environments.

Quite frankly I think that is one of the reasons companies love targeting large corporations. It's slower to get in, but once you're in, it's almost impossible to be fired by your client. A home PC user can ditch a phone, computer, mp3 player, etc... a million times easier than a large corporation can replace a vendor who has a 5 year contract, whose SVP golfs with your CEO, who has 5,000 products in place in your org, that 5,000 people have been trained on, that have to be uninstalled by trained folks, and hauled off by union labor, etc...

How often have you really seen a vendor to a large corp being replaced versus the number of times they've failed to deliver?