Saturday, May 01, 2010

People Hate Change

My company sells specialized software for trucking companies. Often companies that we sell to have been using QuickBooks. And the people in those companies are very reluctant to leave QuickBooks and switch to using our software. And even after they do switch they continue to complain that our software does not work like QuickBooks.

QuickBooks is a good program and no question there are QuickBook features that are our software lacks. But for trucking companies our software does a lot more than QuickBooks ever will. QuickBooks doesn't handle the specialized needs of trucking companies, our software does. But to the people being faced with change, none of that matters, they want the familiar.

This was brought home recently by a long time customer of ours. They're not a trucking company and the software they have is very old. (It's DOS text mode software!) Recently they wanted to set up another company and wanted another copy of this ancient software. We suggested they just use QuickBooks. They came back and said they hated QuickBooks and that their current software is much better! This is so obviously not true that it was funny. It was a good reminder of how strongly biased people are to what they are used to.

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