We were amazed a few weeks ago when a customer from Germany emailed to inquire about an upgrade from version 1.0. Wow! We emailed back asking them to confirm. “Are you sure you’re running version 1? That’s almost 10 years old!”
Sure enough the customer was correct. They were customer number 47 and purchased and installed PaperCut almost 10 years ago. It’s been running perfect ever since but they needed to re-install and had lost the key.
I thought some of our other users may be interested to know more about this story so I emailed Marco and asked him if he’d answer a few questions for our blog. Not only did he oblige, but the team at Landkreis Calw have written us a poem!
Can you tell me what your organization does?
We are part of the system of a local government. Our main services we give to the inhabitants of our region: Driving permissions, license numbers for cars, welfare aid and so on.
How is PaperCut used by you? What feature of PaperCut do you find the most useful?
We have to administrate a network with nearly 650 PCs and nearly 170 software products. We need your product to get the costs of the central printers drilled down to the single user.
Have you been running any other software for 10 years?
There is no other software which is used since 10 years without any update!
Is there a local German beer or food that you’d recommend our Australian developers try?
In our state Baden-Württemberg we have great sorts of beer (“Rothaus Tannenzäpfle”, “Stuttgarter Hofbräu”) and the food is extraordinary good. In our region Nordschwarzwald (Northern Black Forest) we have some restaurants, where the cooks are michelin-starred chefs. A widely known specialty food here is called Maultaschen .
One of my colleagues is a “hobby-poet” and he has written a little poem about this funny story. Here it is:
Your version 1 a perfect one The best of software ever done For us there was not any reason To update it in ev’ry season
Never change a running system No functions of which we’d say we missed them If your old version wouldn’t need a new key We would use v1 for eternity
This is a good story but also a catch-22 for us! In some ways it’s a testament to the longevity of our programming, but on the other hand, we’d love to see sites upgrade more often :-)
We have a very international customer base covering over 60 countries. It’s always nice to hear stories like this. If you’d like to share your story please email us at support.
