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Wednesday July 13, 2005

A customer would never do that...

http://opensolaris.org

Not too long ago I was in a briefing where our marketing folks were providing data generated from visits to current and potential Sun customers. One of the items that was brought up elicited a response of 'A customer would never do that!" when I related it to a fellow engineer. Never mind that several customers had specifically told us they do exactly that, it was hard to believe because it didn't match up with this engineer's experience. Unfortunately most of us in development don't really have a good idea of how customers use (or would like to use) our products.

I won't go into detail on this specific instance because I'm not sure if that customer data can be shared outside of the company. However, I will use an example from a previous company I worked at to illustrate the point:

A previous employer of mine was also a UNIX systems shop, doing both the hardware and software. Loadable kernel modules hadn't come to this company yet, which meant that you had to build kernels specifically for the hardwdare you had installed in the machine. For a given machine you would install the OS with a generic kernel, then install the packages that contained the drivers for the specific hardware options present in the system. Once all the necessary packages were installed, you would build a new kernel on the machine and then reboot onto the new kernel to make all of your hardware functional. If you added a new piece of hardware later on, you would need to install the associated software package, rebuild, and reboot.

Installing the required packages was somewhat tedious, as the full set of packages spanned several 9-track tape reels. You didn't want to install packages you didn't need (due to the time required and limited disk space) so quickly identifying the correct reels was a big time saver. The order and number of packages per tape could vary quite a bit depending on what options were chosen when the tape was created, so installation could be a pain. We talked to the release folks to determine if there was something we could do to simplify life with the tape packages. Several options were discussed, but because "Customers get pre-installed systems and re-installs are very rare" the decision was made not to expend the effort to improve the process.

Sometime after that I was sent out to a customer site to assist the field engineers in the first installation of some brand new hardware. Once the system was physically put together, one of the field engineers proceeded to start a new install. "You don't need to do that," I told him, "It was preinstalled at the factory."

"I know," he replied, "but we've seen so many misconfigured systems that we never trust the factory install. When we put in a new system, we always reinstall from scratch."

And it got even worse. In talking to the site manager, I found that much of the time they loaded the machines with test versions of their database to run sanity checks to satisfy themselves that the new system was working properly. Once they were done, they would then typically re-install again from scratch to be certain that they'd purged all of the test setup before putting the machine into production.

So, while back in the R&D part of the company we thought that re-installs in the field were extremely rare, in reality many of the machines were installed twice at the customer site before going into production. And we didn't even have to go to a customer site to learn this, our own field support people could have told us. We thought we had a reasonable grasp on what customers did and good communication with our field folks but we were wrong.

One of the things I hope the OpenSolaris community can provide us with is a better connection to how people in the real world use or would like to use our products. We have a policy of "Eating our own dog food", or using our own machines to act as our mail servers, home directory servers, etc. While helpful, we've learned the hard way that how we set things up in a development environment is often very different from how it's done "out in the wild". The more channels we have for learning the customer reality the better, so hopefully comments from the OpenSolaris community will supplement and reinforce the information that gets fed back through marketing so that we can better design products that work the way people need them to.

OpenSolaris

Solaris ( Jul 13 2005, 01:15:47 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]