even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason t

even if it had not led to the $4M account (which was an unpredictable, lottery-ticket sort of occurrence), the author identified an excellent "selfish" reason to take the call and spend time with bob - they explicitly designed their software as easy to use, so the travails of an actual person in the industry, who was using their software for his day-to-day business and having problems with it, would have been incredibly valuable user feedback. this is true even if the specific problems bob was having (windows startup options) had superficially nothing to do with their software - if you take a step back, they were all things he needed to do to get their product up and running properly, and were therefore worth taking a look at to see if things could be made easier for the next customer.