2003-08-08 12:00:00

Dissonance

You wanna know what's weird about being a small ISV?  Glad you asked. 

Two days ago I got the following email from a customer:

Please pass along my compliments to your development team. In less than 15 minutes I had installed and uploaded my first project to the vault with ZERO problems. Coming from the source safe world thats unheard of. Awesome job.

Obviously we like these notes, and we're happy that most of our customers have this kind of experience with our product.

And then yesterday I got another email from a different customer.  The message started out like this:

We have just spent several days trying to migrate our VSS repository to Vault with almost no success.

When a customer has problems with our product, we drop everything to help them.  We want to do whatever it takes to make sure they're happy.  But the nagging questions still ring in my mind:  How can both of these emails be true?  Is the product great?  Or is it lame?  Surely it can't be both?

I've been selling dev tools for quite a while now, and I've had to learn that sometimes life is like this.  One customer has no trouble, and another has nothing but.  The reasons are rarely obvious.  All you can do is be thankful that happy customers are the majority, and then get to work figuring out what's wrong.

Granted, this kind of thing happens more often with younger products like Vault.  But strangely enough, it still happens sometimes with SourceOffSite.  This product is quite mature and is being used by over 50,000 people.  And yet, every few months we hear from a customer who just can't make the product work at all.  Weird.

I could write a long article on why this happens, but sometimes it's nice to not be a "know-it-all".  If you're running a small ISV, next time this kind of dissonance happens to you, drop me an email.  We'll commiserate.