> > And when companies try to tell me that I have to pay for "support" on an > > ongoing basis that I may never use--or may use only once in three > > years--I > > get really angry. And if, when I drop support because I never use it, > > then > > need to use it once, they tell me not only do I have to pay for the new > > support, I have to pay for the "back" support that I dropped or they > > won't > > help me, I get worse than mad. > >Though you don't mind paying for individual support incidents as long as >you're not hit for the back charges, I assume from that ?
No, I don't mind paying for support I actually use, if it's a fair price. >Bugs are one thing, but if you have no ongoing support contract, and >someone from the software vendor has to spend a lot of hours >troubleshooting a problem to discover that the issue is actually >environment-related, who pays for their time ? Do you? Does Microsoft or >the AV company that caused the problem? Does the software vendor ? Interesting questions. Three examples, all involving the same software from one of these companies that forced me to pay for back support. This is a fax server system that runs on Windows Server and uses a popular fax card built by a different company. When I started adding Windows 7 machines I needed a minor upgrade to get it to work with that OS. So I downloaded the upgrade, followed instructions to install it, and the thing stopped working. Completely, with any OS. I called tech support. The guy spent about 4 hours on my problem--including a couple on the phone with me going over things. Turned out the upgrade install program failed to correctly write an .ini file for the fax board--but it was me who caught one of the messages going by as he poked around on the server via remote access, and figured out what the problem was. So then he comes back a few minutes later and says, "Oh yeah, we have a note about that here." So now I start using this version with Win 7 and find it constantly displays a message about no email program being configured. I scratch my head because I'm not using the email gateway for the server; I use a fat workstation client for faxes instead. After looking around the knowledge base and user forum and finding nothing, I post a question on the user forum. (This company, by the way, doesn't even allow access to its knowledge base or user forums unless I pay for support, and they threaten mayhem against anybody who publishes anything found in their knowledge base.) The response was prompt--they designed the system to assume that everybody would have Microsoft Outlook installed--even if the thing didn't have any need for email. Brain dead... Anyway, they sent me a patch, which worked. So third incident. People are reporting that they get a strange error message whenever they try to fax to a certain specific number. I do a lot of research and testing myself to verify that it's just this one number, which is answered by one fax machine in a particular location. The same organization has other fax machines in the same building that receive faxes from us just fine, and other organizations can send faxes to the problem number just find. I go on the support forum to look up the error codes..can't find them anywhere. So I'm baffled, call support. This time it took about 6 hours total remote-control poking around plus a couple days during which the tech conducted "research". Halfway through this time he sends me an apparently secret PDF that actually explains what the error codes mean. They indicate the fax machine at the problem number is answering, then hanging up. Finally the tech calls back to tell me that he "found a note here" indicating that the fax board is supposed to throttle itself down to a slower baud rate when it has a problem with a particular machine but "sometimes it doesn't", and he had me set the fax server to send all faxes from now on at half-speed. Oh swell.. but at least that fixed this problem. So. Two out of three issues were the fax software company's fault, and in two out of three, the reason why the support provided took so much expensive time was because the tech couldn't lay his hands quickly on information he already had, and the third problem was the result of a mind-bogglingly stupid assumption on the part of a programmer. They were also all things I could have figured out myself if their precious tech support website and forum, which I need a special (metaphorical) secret decoder ring to access, had actually contained any useful information. So yeah, I really needed support in these three instances, but I'll let you be the judge of whether the $2700 a year I'm forced to pay (I bought the entire system, including an HP server grade machine, software, and $4000 fax board, for about $11,000) was a fair price for what I got. Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
