I guess not every software product is beloved by the people who actually use it – ask around. It turned out that after a reorganization our office was now going to provide support for the Nordic countries. This meant that one of our “new” customers was a large government institution in Finland.
This is not a problem but it seems that since we sold them <redacted> they have not had exactly the best experience. Part of this was not our fault nor was it really the fault of our colleagues from the prior group in the UK, the client choose a supported version but the client picked an unpopular version of our software running on rather niche hardware. There was nothing wrong with the hardware but running on AIX over a fairly slow network to the data center using X windows. The machine was slow, the network was slow and the overall result was that of sluggishness.
We visited the client, the sales person and I, in order to introduce ourselves and to try and keep this somewhat dissatisfied customer happy. Before we left we were warned that the Finnish people were a bit reserved and that we should keep that in mind. It was true although nobody was scowling at us, I don’t really remember many smiles.
The software, while not perfect, had made quite a few strides since it was installed at the client and had even been ported to the PC. In one of our meetings we did an impromptu demonstration using my laptop. A fast new laptop running its own sql server and our software. It looked good, it performed well and was a very effective demo.
The thing that I will always remember was one of the quietest people in these meetings was very interested in what the new software would do. He became excited and animated and was asking about how they could get this software.
It was a breakthrough, there was a lot less tension and a lot more smiles after that. Yet, I don’t know if he broke some sort of written or unwritten rule. After such a large showing of animation and enthusiasm we did not see this particular person at any more of our meetings over the next two days.