Our customers are not crash dummies ...

… and we don’t treat them like such. This is the gist of a conversation we had over the weekend. A JackRabbit unit running Centos 5.2 going out to a customer in the financial services space, required firmware updates for some of its components. It would have been simply too easy for us to do what many of our competitors do, and ship them a firmware/driver update on a CD or USB stick, or point them to a login for downloading the bits. Leave them the pain of doing this.

But we don’t believe in this. We want to test, to make sure it fixes things. And see what it does to the settings. So we loaded the firmware and tested. And we found performance issues. Which we fixed. We made sure the tune was correct. This requires burn in and load testing. Which thanks to work from Vijay and me, is pretty well automated. We could have let our customers do this. And had them run into the problems we ran into. Which would have pissed them off. Which we don’t want to do. A happy customer is a good thing. We want as many of them as possible. A crash dummy is what some other folks have as their view of their customer base. Ship ‘em volumes and hope that most of it works. Quantity more than quality. Thats just not something we agree with. Quality first. If it doesn’t work well, it doesn’t ship.