I've witnessed similar situations play out more than once, but to the negative with bad service aimed at seemingly insignificant people killing six and seven figure orders.
That said, I think you're missing something if the potential windfall is your impetus for quality service.
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." —Malcolm S. Forbes [0]
The third para from the end suggests it's at least somewhat fictionalised.
+++
Oh, found this http://www.bsiusa.com/about/about.php (seems Burley didn't know much about trademarks when he set out?).
Edit: Also http://www.paulneevel.com/hp_archive/070830ronburley.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081390
There are many points and counter-points there, with more anecdotes, and some data.
Comments there are closed, of course, it being so old, so any new discussion will have to be here.
A simple check of the account would suggest that they needed a bit of karma, their submission of the Hudsonreed site was DOA (as most, 'create an account, submit a site' type submissions are). They haven't made any comments to get karma that way, so they use the 'other' well known karma farming technique, scrape HN for past stories that were popular and re-submit them at the 'right' time. It has become enough of a signal that I suspect pg could add it into his heuristics for spammers.
The lesson could easily be: I played the lotto and won big. Therefore, everyone should play the lotto.
I've just finished several freelance jobs where I've made sure to go above what was required. That's several people who will recommend me to others. That's not playing the lottery, it's just a sensible way of operating.
If C * S > R / P, then don't play.
It wouldn't make sense, for instance, for a company like Google to treat all its customers the same way that enterprise SaaS companies treat their more precious customers. S is too big for them. That level of service is manpower intensive.
On the other hand it's probably something you can afford to at the beginning, when you have few customers - an advantage of being a startup, (as I recall being told a few years back, 'You are your own slave labour.')
"Use this guy, you don't have to pay him for all the work."
?
But.
While it can be great to have a general philosophy of "always provide the best customer service possible, even at 2am, no matter the customer," a great CEO will need to act based on the realities of their business situation -- informed by these philosophies, but not locked down by them.
I agree that in the context of business you should always be as nice as possible, no matter how difficult of a time you're having with someone. But some customers aren't the right customers for your business, and they should be guided elsewhere.
Specifically with Dell, one of their big angles, IIRC, was custom built stuff. While there wasn't an unlimited variation of possibilities, it was enough that my Dell wasn't necessarily the same as your Dell - whether it was their problem or not, many other vendors would punt on the support.
As long as you can, do things that don't scale. Even if the end of this history were different, the writer would have lost near to nothing, and possibly gained some insight.
Most of the comments in this thread assume that the cost of support is trivial. It's not. Support is a product unto itself, and shouldn't be trivialised into "come on, it doesn't take much!".
These are all starting to look like SugarApe out of Nathan Barley.
