Vendors: moving on.

So after living, working, and breathing in the technology world for the majority of my life it's safe to say that i have had a wide ranging experience with a number of vendors, distributors, and resellers.

The quality of these experiences has ranged from great, to good, which then jumps to thoroughly disgusting. I know which experiences are remembered the most, and those vendors are no longer in the stack of cards, and actively avoided at all costs.

It has been a few years since it happened - but one particular experience with a vendor always sticks in my mind. I will never use them again on principle purely because they put people's lives in danger for a license renewal. During out of hours they took up limited capacity on a 24/7 emergency helpline where people's lives were concerned.

We took it up the chain that they had taken out of hours emergency worker capacity away from the front lines, and several apologies were offered. Unfortunately we saw no change in their behaviour over the following months and pulled the plug on them as a vendor.

I mean - For a sale, they had put people's lives on the line and although the corporate apology occurred they didn't change a damn thing. I can't ethically sponsor, sell, or use a vendor with that lack humanity within them. They proved it a few years down the line when they hit the news and proved the dilemma for them was shareholder profits, and a supposed public image.

I've had other vendors openly admit to shady practices and sales techniques when they let their guard down. Again we will stop using those in the near future when it is possible to do so (yay for long term contracts).

One solution we're using internally came from implementing ISO20000:2013, the supplier and vendor matrix breaks down several aspects of a vendor and their chain.

So how do we change this as the technology community? Cancel culture is one thing but we're open to being personally chased for calling these organisations out.

I'd love some suggestions on this.