The reason people trust us is because we never break our promises and we deliver timely, excellent products that are relevant to people's needs. How do we know what people need? We ask them. Some people have remarked "Greenleaf and Serial Comm are synonymous." I turn a little red when someone says something like that; then I recall all those long walks, figuring things out, playing mental Towers of Babylon with CPU registers, the midnight hours trying to outrun the inevitable crash of a hard drive or loss of files. At times like that I recall many trips taken carrying not one but two Spectron DataScopes (they're about the size of a suitcase and weigh about the same as a small camel), bound for some God-forsaken place where two systems couldn't communicate and the job was to diagnose and fix. So, maybe a bit of all that rubbed off on Greenleaf, I know it did on me. And so, while it sometimes amazes me that we have not one but three serial communications libraries. It amazes me that one of the Shuttles carried an avionics package with Greenleaf CommLib in the middle of it. It amazes me that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had one of those mission-critical (they said) applications that worked because of Greenleaf Comm++. To the customers out there, thousands of them in almost all countries of the world, these applications may seem mundane, routine. To me, whose code is in the loop, it is nerve-wracking time because I never want to let a customer down. I never want to tell someone, "Well, sorry, I guess we don't do THAT after all, but we'll work on it..."

Trust is first. If you don't feel you can trust us, please don't buy anything from us. Of course, there are so many people who've been following Greenleaf around -- some for twenty plus years -- that surely we must have done something right. So, let us earn your trust the old-fashioned way -- we'll work for it.

It's after 5:00 p.m. on Friday and we're here tidying up after a long week. The phone rings. A crisis: Suddenly a customer wants us to ship a new order overnight. We do it. If there is hardware involved and we don't have it in stock, we try to arrange a drop-ship. Now, not every small company (or big one) will do this. I call it "treating customers like I want to be treated." If that sounds trite, then perhaps you haven't tried to buy something when the store is closed. Ours is never completely closed of course, but products don't get shipped automatically, there are humans involved. Policies are one thing but having suddenly discovered I needed a particular item and need it FAST is something else, and believe me, I can count the number of software companies who will go the extra mile to help someone get up and running quickly on the fingers of one hand and have fingers left over. We can't promise to always do this but we do our best.

Justifiable Paranoia
There's a lot of justifiable paranoia about privacy, the Patriot Act, and identity theft. Last Wednesday I got an official looking email "from" Bank of America" (my bank) ostensibly "helping me" by "adding one more piece of information they can check to make sure I'm who I say I am." Logos were correct. Fonts were the same. Writing style looked the same. Now, I'm a bit dumb at times but I'm not crazy. I clicked on the "more info" button and was confronted with what seemed to be a total "everything about me, my mother, my mother's cat, my mother's cat's vet," form, and before going any further, I viewed and printed the source code for the form. Oh, it was created by someone who knows web design very well. I couldn't see a single ASP bug. I copied out the email headers, did a WhoIs on the IP and found it has nothing to do with Bank of America. That by itself is not totally damning--they could have outsourced it. I looked more closely to the email itself. In the second line of text, the word measures was misspelled mesures. That did it for me. Then I noticed it was addressed to me at GreenleafSoft.com, one of my email addresses but not one the bank knows about.

Check it out
I called Bank of America Fraud department, filed a fraud report with them, same to the FBI and Dallas Police (to make me feel good, not going to do amy other good. Bank of America told me they'd gotten a flood of calls about this email. I asked them what constituted a "flood." and the agent said, oh maybe dozens. Not encouraging. Dozens? I monitor about 7 email accounts and all together got six copies of this thing and they got "oh maybe dozens?" Where are the rest of y'all?

Dozens??
Everybody's tired of worrying about privacy. Whoever crafted a "very close to real" Bank of America email could have gotten me easily had I been sleepy, extra nutty that morning, or just plain lazy. They didn't. Get me, that is. But they did get some people. They had enough "required" fields in that form to give them everything about me but my DNA. The FBI called me back, asked for and got a plaintext version of the source code for that form and for the email itself. Nonzero interest. Bank of America seemed mostly irritated at whoever was available to be irritated at. I didn't fill out the form, told Andy about it and withstood a scorching 15 minute diatribe about opening email. Heart and mind in right place.

My point is
one has to learn, hopefully not the hard way, whom to trust and for what in this world. Yes, I'm biased but I'm also a person who does what he says and says what he means, and I think you should not trust Greenleaf Software for your life. That would be a bad idea because there's no way we can insure that. But for a few hundred or few thousand dollars worth of great software? Well, that's your decision--all I can tell you is that a quarter of a century ago I formed a company with the rule that if the day ever came that we could not behave towards others as we want them to treat us, I'd just close the doors. Mostly what one has in this world is one's word, and if that is no good, well, that's pretty sorrowful.

How good is our stuff?
To a degree this depends on what you expect it to do. I mean, if you spend $700 on a Greenleaf or Frontline protocol analyzer and it doesn't analyze protocols, breaks all the time, you probably ought to take that into consideration next time you feel the need to buy software from Greenleaf Software. But we believe, from past experience of worldwide sales of millions of dollars of software that word-of-mouth has been very good to us. You know, if someone likes your stuff he or she maybe tells 4 people; if he doesn't like it he probably tells 30 people. A lot of people have told their friends that they ought to look at Greenleaf for serial "stuff." That's a good thing, because when you have something that's relevant, good, and the vendor treats you right, it's a win-win as the sales guys say.