Choosing to buy software from a small company.
By Andrey Butov
Software is software, bits are bits, and development tools are easily available.
Why should a customer prefer to purchase a comparable piece of software from a small software shop rather than from a massive, international software company?
An example from earlier this week:
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Tuesday (8:30 AM EST) — TRIAL USER BOB:
“Hello there Antair. We’ve downloaded the latest version of your BlackBerry Spam Filter. The product is great. This version is much better than previous versions. But there is this nasty error message that keeps coming up when [….]”
Tuesday (8:35 AM EST) — ANDREY (ANTAIR):
“Hi Bob. Thank you for your interest in Antair BlackBery Spam Filter. We are looking into your issue. If possible, can you provide some additional details? In particular, does this error message […]“
Tuesday (9:30 AM EST) — TRIAL USER BOB:
“Hi Andrey. Thank you for the quick response. The error message […]“
Tuesday (11:45 AM EST) — ANDREY (ANTAIR):
“Hi Bob. We’ve identified this as an issue on a small number of BlackBerry models. We’ve fixed the bug and released the new patch. You can download […]“.
Tuesday (2:30 PM EST) — TRIAL USER BOB:
“Hello Andrey. Wow. That was quick. We’ve downloaded the patch and everything is working great now! We will be purchasing some licenses later on today.”
Tuesday (4:09 PM EST) — ANTAIR SALE PROCESSING SCRIPT:
“Received an order for 8 licenses for Antair BlackBerry Spam Filter 2.5 from [CUSTOMER BOB].
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Let’s see a huge international software company do that!
Cheers!
Your friendly small software company business owner.
