Tenacious programs

I have a friend who at one time wrote a couple of programs at work. He did this, as they say, for the soul - he simply took and automated his activities. At first nobody paid attention to his work, they say, you are picking and God is with you. After some time, the programs began to “creep away” - people came from neighboring departments, then from neighboring offices and asked to share. Somewhere in a year and a half we counted more than 100 installations of the program, despite the fact that it lacked documentation and technical support. That was in 2001. In 2002, a friend changed the field of activity and stopped developing. The programs have already been distributed to other regions, a thesis was written on one of them. The friend did not receive money from the programs, and he didn’t really try.
Interesting things started this year when, by order of the head office located in Moscow, both programs were first replaced with centralized ones and then disconnected altogether. In fact, it turned out that in almost all the divisions that exploited my friend's programs, the employees filled out both Moscow and "their" programs with data.
The shutdown did not last long - one program was returned after 3 days, another - after two weeks. Moreover, they want to pay a friend for the development of both programs, and one of them was charged to implement them in all departments.
The moral of this story is this: if a program is written from below, on demand, then people will be a mountain behind it and it will have a long life, although perhaps not always happy. Unlike programs that are imposed from above, which people use, but often quietly hate.