Thom, forget the "ethics" question. People do not buy good ethics,
i.e. you are never rewarded for them. You're punished for bad ethics,
but that is a different story. If you offer something for free,
everyone will take their share and more. If you offer something for
sale, some people will take without paying. And in the software game,
few "customers" get punished for bad ethics. So just forget it, it's
posturing.
Often times, businesses offer some free support before purchase. It's
called pre-sales support and in a profit seeking business, it's about
converting the support requesters to customers, not about being
"ethical". Now, if you're customers are responsive to you being a
good guy and that makes them buyers, then by all means. But what do
you really owe a user who hasn't paid, isn't giving any indication
they will, and is sucking up all your time? Nothing. Or maybe you owe
it to them to find a competing product from a competing developer
they can suck dry.
Depending on where your product needs special expertise, you may even
want to charge for "getting started" support. For example, our
Bosco's Screen Share requires a little bit of network setup to use
100% of the features. Computer experts can usually figure it out
quickly, smart people can read our docs and get through it in an hour
or so, but some novices and lots of professionals would rather ask
for help from us. In fact, they pay for help from us. While we give
the product away for free, we have productized installation support
and are making decent money from installation support. When you have
a product finished, there are lots of ways to skin the monetization
pig, and if you let silly, unreasonable "ethics" burdens get in your
way, you reduce the number of ways. I'm not saying that ethics are
stupid. I'm saying that some people's concepts are unreasonable and
limiting. Having to provide unlimited free tech support to either
customers or non-paying users for ethical reasons is stupid ethics.
For business reasons, if it works for you, great! For business
reasons, cloaked in "ethics" because it sounds nice, great! But for
"ethical" reasons alone, that's stuck on stupid.
-Brad
On Feb 19, 2006, at 4:27 AM, Thom McGrath wrote:
I think you understand, but I'd like to clarify just in case. I'm
not talking about charging money for support requests, I'm talking
about only providing support to customers who have paid.
I'm think I'm going with my gut here and simply leaving the channel
open. Thanks for the thoughts everybody.
--
Thom McGrath
The ZAZ Studios
<http://www.thezaz.com/> AIM: thezazstudios
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