Don't punish your customers for your incompetencies

Often, there is a common practice amongst huge organizations to dictate their terms and conditions to a customer. And this is not done with a baton or a whip, but more in terms of soft talk from the sales engineer. Have a bunch of IIM grads who can do the talking and they can sell crap claiming it to be cheese.

For instance, a software vendor, gets a requirement from a customer to design a product according to their specifications. And since this SV has a crappy server which is not being sold on high note in the market wants to make some more revenue, they actually decide to do their development on this platform. The end result, the developers are a frustrated lot since they have spent close to 1 year making the product work on this platform, and the remaining part of their time in the company searching for a better option in a saner organization. Then you have the customer. Ah, the customer, the fall guy in all this mayhem. In most cases, the customer would be an innocent employee in a non-IT organization who would have requested for this product thinking it would make his life easier. The end result, to use this product he has to:

1. Hire a consultant who would charge him by the hour for telling him he needs to upgrade all his systems to a better configuration.

2. Hire a consultant who would procure the systems.

3. Hire a consultant who would setup the landscape on the systems.

4. Hire a consultant who would deploy the backend on the lanscape.

5. Hire a consultant who would raise messages to the IT support team about things not working.

6. Hire a consultant to supervise over these consultants.

And just when the non-IT chap thinks he has it all sorted out and things are just shaping up, a new patch for the server arrives which brings down the entire landscape.

This is the apathy towards the customers which causes many a giants to fall on their face. When we design a product for a customer, we need to think that one day we might be the customer using the same product. And then design with this attitude to success.