I had been clicking around the web. Landed on a site for database performance monitoring. This topic was interesting to me. But since I run a company myself, I wanted to determine how well this site's marketing was.
So I checked out the sites FAQ web page. They required that I have an Oracle database to collect information about the performance monitoring. This was so even if I was trying to monitor a different type of database such as Microsoft SQL Server. Not encouraging.
Then later in the FAQ page I spotted a grammatical error. Now I see errors like this all the time, so I was able to decipher what they meant. However misspellings or grammar problems make me think that care was not exercised when creating the web site. And if care was lacking there, it makes me wonder if care was lacking in their product.
I ended up not even downloading a trial of the product. The thing that most swayed me was the database requirement. I don't want to have to install a database just to try out a product. Perhaps they had no choice to introduce this dependency. But they lost a potential customer.
The important thing is to take this lesson to heart with my own products. So far I have strived to make my applications easy to install and run. In fact, my applications do not even have a separate install step. You just run the executable. No environment setup is required. Considering my potential customer base, I wanted it to be as easy as possible to run my application. Let's hope this pays off in the end.
