The Customer Lies

An engineer of a company called me saying: “Our COO wants us to evaluate your software for our product design”. Then we set a meeting with him and the COO.

This morning I went there; a first technical meeting with the designers, before seeing the COO. They said the software would be used as an on-off application on a single project. They found the software difficult to learn, therefore they asked me for a quotation for a consultancy project. Then, the COO joined the meeting. I resumed what I was asked by his engineers, and this is what he said: “I don’t need you to design my product, I want my engineers to do that for all our products”. His engineers nodded in agreement.

Customers lie, for many personal reasons. Rephrasing the Newton’s law of inertia:

An object (an engineer) at rest (working in Research & Development) will remain at rest (will use the same technology, methods) unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force (unless their boss twists their ears).