Does Selling Support Mean Coding Less Features?

Frymaster asks: "Eric S. Raymond gave a *five hour* keynote at this years MacHack. No surprise, he spent most of the time on the open-source soapbox and told the MacHack-ers that "service and support" is where the money is. I've been neck-deep in the Mac community for 10+ years and the most noticable thing about Mac developers is their commitment to making their software easy and obvious. The unspoken theory is that if the user has to look at the manual, the developer has to improve the interface. Even my dad can use a Mac without asking for help... not very good for "support" revenue. This raises the question: Does having a business plan that relies on support for revenue act as a disincentive for implementing ease-of-use features?"

Comments

interesting

[crovax]

I never looked at open scource development that way before.
But I would have to say no.
Having a business plan that relies on support for revenue pushes the developers to develop a product that is of the highest quality possible.
The goal is to get as many people to use there product as possible.
Despite the ease of the GUI any OS that is popular will bring lots of support revenue.

-----
If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

That's why I don't buy stock in Red Hat...

[god_of_the_machine]

I always thought that the open-source progress was the fatal flaw in Red Hat's (and other commercial open-source vendors relying on support costs) business plan. As more people adopt the software and fix the bugs and improve the interface (especially reducing the reliance on the command line), there will be less need for support.

I mean, how many people need to call Microsoft for support installing Windows 98SE?? Not much because its so damn easy. Two years people wrote book after book on how to install Linux... now who needs it?? Improved driver support, improved ease-of-use... it's so simple that my grandparents could install most packages.

Now of course there will always be support needs for the more advanced users, and for developers. But those are minor compared with most users, who can figure it out for themselves because of low requirements. How is Red Hat, or any other company, going to make much money off of that???

-rt-

Re:That's why I don't buy stock in Red Hat...

[h2odragon]

Installing is not the same as maintaining; or recovering from the results of no maintenance.

I haven't seen a succsessful "Mom test" of Win98 yet; much less a "Grandma test" of RedHat; I think you may be optimistic about their ease of use.

Revenue stream

[Lesson1]

If your applications require no support then the money spent on support contracts is all profit! Although after a while companies will realize that they do not require support for App 1.0, but by then you'll have App 2.0 on the market requiring a new set of support contracts, and if nobody calls your support lines then more profit for you.

Re:Revenue stream

[Tet]

If your applications require no support then the money spent on support contracts is all profit!

Correct. Thinking from a home user's point of view is fundamentally flawed. How many home users will buy a support contract? Companies, on the other hand, will buy support contracts, and the ease of use of the software has no bearing on that decision. The purpose of a support contract is not usually to enable users to ask for help when they don't understand something. It's to protect the business in the event of a bug or other failure. Think of a support contract as an insurance policy. It's a good thing to have, even if you never make a claim. Make your product as fully featured and easy to use as you want. You support revenue will be unaffected, and your support costs will be lower.

There will always be a need for support

[richie123]

These people who say "well, someday computers

will be so easy to use that you won't need support!" a

Hence the _Apple_ topic

[scruffyMark]

I haven't seen a succsessful "Mom test" of Win98 yet; much less a "Grandma test" of RedHat; I think you may be optimistic about their ease of use.

That's why people are talking about Apple products. Their basic design process is based on <insert your computer newbie ancestor> tests. And they are successful.

Installing is not the same as maintaining; or recovering from the results of no maintenance.

Actually, Macs are also pretty darn good about dealing with lack of maintenance, especially with what most people use them for. And I suspect that when Mac OS X.2 or X.II or whatever comes out, that's one of the things that will be even more improved over the current system. This is slightly off-topic, but their new system of using a whole directory hierarchy that contains all supporting files, global configs, executables etc., but from a user's point of view acts as a single executable file should have a real impact there

That's why open source, free software with charges for support is a model that likely couldn't work for Apple.