“That’s Nothing Compared to Japanese Consumers.”, 2022-01-28 ():
We were a US company working with a Japanese software distributor to do Japanese versions of our products. Occasionally on some Japanese non-IBM compatible PCs we were seeing a lockup during installation.
It was the kind of lockup where CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, the CAPS LOCK light no longer toggles, and if you have a GUI that mouse pointer no longer moves. There’s usually pretty much nothing to do at that point except hit the reset button or toggle power.
It was quite rare, giving us not much to work with. Our Japanese partners decided it was rare enough to go ahead and ship, handling the (hopefully) handful of people that hit it via tech support.
So we shipped. And they got something like 100 support calls—but the callers were not upset. In fact, they were happy with the product except that they wanted to suggest that the installer should be made faster or should run in the background so they could use the computer while the install takes place. The reports said that the install took something like 20–30 hours.