Well behaved software companies
I admit to a bias since I work for a Splunk reseller, but I’m primarily an end-user of their product when I am consulting. I think Splunk is doing a lot of things right as a software vendor. Namely:
- The software generally works as advertised
- It is very easy to get up and running, and the architecture is easy to change if your requirements shift
- Updates occur on a pretty quick cadence
- There is a free license version of the product that has a reasonable amount of functionality and works fine for people that don’t have a huge data need
- All of their documentation is freely available (I dislike vendors that make you spend $ or jump through hoops to access docs)
- They use the excellent StackOverflow engine for their community driven support site answers.splunk.com, making it easy to contribute and floating good answers to the top
Another company that I hold in a similar light is Atlassian (although they don’t have free versions, they have licenses for the first 10 users available for $10, which is close enough).