La Monte Henry Piggy Yarroll wrote: > I might contest the premise that only the most clueless seek > professional help. I have two anecdotal counter-examples. If the postulate does not hold, then the thesis does not either. But the market research I am reading tells me is that the postulate is true. >[..] > > The best salesman for open source service businesses is in-house expertise. No doubt. But when the in-house experts decide to do it by themselves, you are not getting revenue from them (until perhaps later, when they or their bosses want to dump responsibility as I mentioned, or they learn how hard it is and want someone else to, as you did mention. Best-F >> >> Why is this an F/OSS concern? Well, we all know that, in general, >> engineers like to think that "customers suck", but this thinking >> pushes it to a new level: while in the proprietary market, all >> customers must purchase support from you, in our brave new world, only >> the less clueful need to. Besides the inherent higher stress this >> places on the support crew, this is also expensive from a business >> perspective - the ideal support customers are, obviously, the ones who >> never need it. > Customers who never need your support don't generally renew. The ideal > customer from a business perspective puts less load on your support > staff than their subscription covers. > > In an open source market, the customer is often looking at the same > source you are looking at. I can't tell you how fabulous this is from > the perspective of the support crew. >> Am I wondering about the obvious? Perhaps I am being too >> pessimistic. But if you accept the postulate, the thesis seems to follow. > My empirical experience is that the most clueful customers I've ever had > were those paying for open source support. This suggests that there is > some defect in either the postulate or the thesis... > > -- _________________________________________ -- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish (Federico L. Lucifredi) - http://www.lucifredi.com