So I have two interesting pieces of news.

1. I know now for sure that a Honda Civic can be rear ended by a Ford F-150 and drive away with far less damage. In fact, the truck couldn’t drive away period.

2. I’m a developer again.

The first item is pretty self-explanatory. The second requires a bit of a story.

A few weeks ago I went to a funeral for my wife’s Uncle Craig. Out of the clear blue sky he had a heart attack even though he had no previous heart problems. Just days before we had been up for his daughter’s wedding where he walked her down the aisle. For the funeral she had to be called back from her honeymoon in Jamaica.

He was only 52.

Too young, too early, too unexpected, too unfair, too badly timed, all these things apply. I’ve been to funerals before but this particular one stood out. This was the first one that I’ve been to since I’ve had my own kids. Looking over at his kids, even though they are adults now, I couldn’t help but think of mine.

I couldn’t help but think that life is too short.

When I first met Craig about 15 years ago he wasn’t much older than I am now. It was clear from the beginning though that he was a stand up guy. Even though the extended family is large and a gathering, like say Christmas, is best described as “freaking humongous” he always had time to come say hello even though I was just the boyfriend of one of his many nieces.

Over the years I got a chance to watch his kids grow up. His daughter is now a beautiful school teacher and his sons are the types of guys that you want to be in your crew, the kind that you know will have your back. I hope my kids turn out that well some day. I hope I do as good a job as he did.

While I hate to think about it, watching all this made me ponder, “What if all I have left is twenty years?” I remember when that seemed like a long time. Somehow it doesn’t seem like that anymore. It’s cliché to say, “Live each day as your last” so I won’t do that. Besides, that’s just not possible. What I will say is that you shouldn’t live each day doing something that you aren’t truly happy doing.

It is with all this in mind that I moved back to writing software. It has been an interesting year in the marketing/strategy world and I now know that my brain is not wired for that type of work. Thinking about positioning and messaging are the sorts of things that wake some people up in the morning, including some people that are very good at it here. I could do the work but it wasn’t my ambition. It isn’t who I am. And there’s not enough time to spend doing something that isn’t you.

Life is too short.

So I raise a beer to Uncle Craig. Goodbye, God speed, and thanks for inspiring me to try to find happiness.

Craig Snyder (1955-2008)

There’s a brand new whitepaper available that was written by Keith, one of our actual writers. (As opposed to the monkey with a keyboard that posts to this blog.) He knew all about the single space nonsense that messed me up for a solid week and can literally make words dance on a page.

Darnedest thing I ever saw, words dancing like that. And to the Cha-Cha Slide no less.

Anyhow the paper has the catchy title of “Quality-Centric Application Lifecycle Management in a Down Economy” which given the economic woes of the country at the moment is rather timely. It’s super good, but my favorite part is this section:

“In a slow economy, businesses carefully consider every purchase, looking for ways to control costs and squeeze as much value as possible out of the money they spend. While flaws in software are always a concern, companies are less patient with them when cash is tight.

Releasing poor quality software builds the expectation that initial releases will be buggy. If a release date slips several times, new and potential customers may assume there is a problem with quality and will be reluctant to buy when the software is finally released. Even a single sub-par release can sow the seeds of doubt. Once doubt creeps into the minds of existing customers, they may resist purchasing new releases, preferring to allow other early adopters to work through the problems, or worse, they may decide not to buy at all.”

That’s a simple point, one that we don’t often think about, but it is absolutely true. How many times have you said you’ll wait for the first dot release or service pack before upgrading? Or perhaps wait for the second model year of a car? Or how about the 3G version of a wireless phone that you may have seen in the news recently?

Why do we do this? Part of it may be that new products don’t have all the features we want. But an even bigger part is that it is ridiculously easy to assume the first version will be buggy. Heaven help you if your products actually live up this stereotype because now it becomes an uphill (read: expensive) climb to get customers to trade their money for your stuff when a new release hits.

And that’s what it is really all about in the business of software. You spend all this time and money creating this new version and what you really want is for customers to buy it. Writing software is expensive and it is the selling of it that covers all those costs. If you have to write a dot release before the cash starts coming in then now you’re writing on credit, and playing with credit is not the optimal situation in down economic times. Sure winning the Google-just-bought-me-do-I-buy-the-black-ferrari-or-red-one-heck-I’ll-just-get-both-why-chose lottery might be a plan where credit spending is a good idea but those are some long odds and it’s a risky bet when it doesn’t come through. Like the shutter the doors and sell off the assets kind of risky or find a new gig kind of risky.

Anyhow there is lots of other good stuff in the paper besides this and I won’t ruin the rest of the story by giving it all away here. Well, I will say this, none of the words in this one actually dance. (I blame the PDF format more than anything.)

This past Christmas my mother-in-law bought my father-in-law a new notebook computer. It was intended to replace his current laptop, which was so far beyond long in the tooth that it was being sized for dentures. (It was a Pentium II running Windows ME. No, seriously.)

His computing needs are very modest so she chose a budget model from a large well-known manufacturer that was a huge step up from the current one. So long as it was able to accomplish three tasks life would be good.

1. Connect to AOL via a modem because they live in an area that is unreachable by cable or DSL.
2. Play Windows card games
3. Run an old version of Excel to keep track of some finance stuff and some sports statistics.

So that’s the stage, we’re not talking giant needs in computation here. The problem is that after a few months the new computer stopped being able to accomplish item #1. The internal modem would no longer detect a dial tone, and even stranger an external USB modem had the same problem. Blame whomever you want, Vista, the manufacturer, Congress, the French, it makes no difference. The bottom line here is that the thing simply doesn’t work.

After I took a look at it, having to resurrect knowledge of modems that I had purged from memory years ago, I came to the conclusion that they’d need to use the warranty and contact the manufacturer to get it fixed. They’ve had the machine for eight weeks now. The call center in India kept explaining that it was at “our highest level of priority” to the point where the mother-in-law gave up and called the corporate office looking for help. Now she has the direct number and name of a guy there and I’m not even sure he’s in the support division.

My advice to him, get it fixed however you can. Ship a brand new machine if you have to. She’s not shy and is very persistent. If she claims she’ll call you, your boss, your mom, your dog, your cousin’s boyfriend’s college roommate twice removed she’ll do it. I cannot stress to you enough the seriousness of your situation.

What this whole story really highlights is the myth of customer support or rather the myth that it is nothing but a loss vehicle at a company. Sure it can be expensive to have competent, trained people working in support. It can also look mighty tempting to cut costs here. But here’s the trick, nothing, and I repeat nothing, will stand out more in the minds of your customers that good customer support. On the flip side, you can spend as much time as you want with whatever grand methodology you choose creating the most bug free software in the entire wide world but it can all fall apart with poor customer support.

When I had a DVD drive go bad in an iBook the guy at the Apple store immediately offered to swap out the entire computer. When I had a heat shield pull off, out of warranty, on an Acura I used to own the dealer replaced it for free and gave me a loaner on the spot. These are examples of places where I will continue to spend obscene amounts of money thanks to support. I’ll also recommend them to anyone I know that is looking for such a thing.

Heck, one time I even wrote to Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster with a question and I wasn’t even a customer of his. It didn’t matter, fifteen minutes later I got a response. That reminds me, I need to go pick up a copy of Delicious Library 2.

At the same time when I had a furnace go out in the dead of winter and called their “on call” guy to come fix it I could tell that his claims of being booked for the night were false. This was because, well, I COULD HEAR THE NOISE AT THE BAR IN BACKGROUND.

I’ll bet you can guess whether or not they got the business when the furnace finally kicked the bucket two years later.

I don’t usually talk about the internal workings at Seapine but in the case of our support organization I’ll make an exception. I do this largely because of the level of seriousness we take it since we have found, over and over again through interaction with paying customers, that it is a competitive advantage for us. All of our support people are full time employees and all of them actually know the products they support. We don’t have call scripts because that encourages the idea that you can plug just anyone into that role so long as they can read. The entire organization is overseen directly by our VP of Quality so he is responsible for internal testing before release and the ongoing help after release. We do follow up surveys with customers that call or email in making sure that the level of support they received was satisfactory. The majority of them are even located at the same physical facility as the developers. It is a huge deal for us, something that we can provide that others choose not to. It has without doubt made us far more money that it costs.

FAR more money.

Do you know the best thing though? It fulfills the modern American dream. It keeps mother-in-laws from repeatedly calling. (I joke with love. Really. No need to call.)