GBU

Good

"The bottom half of all my printouts are blurry," user complains to IT. He orders a replacement drum for the printer, but it doesn't help. Neither does a new printer. So he goes to her desk and asks her to print something. "As the paper starts to emerge," says IT, "she yanks it out of the printer and says, 'See what I mean?'"

Bad

Big electronics company is building a factory for a joint venture. But the locally hired IT manager is a little fuzzy on some details, says IT support working there. "The general manager told him to build a raised floor in the computer room," IT support sighs. "A month later, we saw it - he literally raised the floor six inches by pouring a cement slab six inches thick."

Ugly

Salesforce.com filed a lawsuit last month; now UpShot has fired back. The budding field of hosted CRM applications is becoming the scene of a legal shoot-out, with UpShot filing a countersuit against rival Salesforce.com.

UpShot announced that it had filed a countersuit against Salesforce.com over claims that company has been making against UpShot. On July 14, San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, launched a complaint in the same courthouse, alleging that UpShot had engaged in "false advertising, unfair competition and unfair business practices". Salesforce.com objected to an UpShot ad whose headline boasted that the company was the "The Better CRM Online Solution". Salesforce.com said it also challenged UpShot's advertisements through the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. It said that NAD concluded the assertions weren't supported and needed to be changed to be more accurate.

The high-profile CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, said in a news release at the time of the lawsuit: "In light of UpShot's false advertising claims and its failure to withdraw these claims when challenged, we are pursuing this issue through the courts."

Now, UpShot has launched its own legal counterstrike. Rather than seeking damages, which Salesforce.com requested, UpShot wants the court to keep Salesforce.com from "using misleading information in its Web site content, sales literature, press materials and communications to customers".

E-mails to Sandra_Rossi@idg.com.au

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