Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 06:31:44 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Julian Elischer <julian@freefall.freebsd.org> Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org, rgrimes@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: FBSD support inc. Message-ID: <9223.818605904@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Dec 1995 03:37:54 PST." <199512101137.DAA02888@freefall.freebsd.org>
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> I've been thinking about setting up a company (actually more than one) > to give commercial support for freeBSD. I think this is a fine idea, and not exactly one we haven't been over before, but I still wouldn't want to start with quite so complicated a picture as this. When you're selling support, you're selling a service that *has* to work for each and every customer who's forked over good money for it or the whole thing breaks down and you've got the better business bureau calling you on the phone (or worse, somebody's legal dept). This means that it's got to be possible to quantify just how long any given service call will take to respond to and also to make sure that each and every call is tracked and resolved properly. Even simply measuring this is non-trivial, and the difficulty increases exponentially with the number of staff (and cubed by their distance from you). You also want to be able to easily determine where you're spending the most money and time since support will eat you up (and make you unprofitable) very quickly if you don't keep things carefully streamlined. Basically, where tech support is concerned, the KISS principle should be obeyed in spades. I'd much prefer to see a smaller organization with 3-4 people in one central location that can be easily managed, not some international hydra that's a management nightmare. Doing international FreeBSD project management is one thing - we don't need to be accountable to anyone and can afford to play a number of things fast-and-loose. Add accountability to the equation and the rules change quite significantly. International tech support is also nice to have, but don't forget that BSDI got away without a U.K. office for quite some time until they'd grown large enough to actually staff one effectively. I don't think that international customers are that unused to the idea of calling the U.S., as much of a pain as that might sometimes be. They certainly don't seem to show any reluctance to calling WC's tech support hotline at all hours of the day and night, and that's just for $39 CDROMs! :-) I certainly don't mean to rain on Julian's parade, but the picture he paints, as rosy as it might seem on the surface, seems an absolute nightmare of complexity as I try to envision all the various details required. I certainly wouldn't want to manage such a system, and I would also be worried about such a venture collapsing under its own weight and perhaps tarnishing the project's reputation as well (whether or not "the project" actually had anything to do with it). I'm not saying that any one piece of the proposal Julian's made here is necessarily unworkable, I'm saying that all of them together simply adds up to too much weight. Too many variables, too many things that can go wrong, and in any startup like this Murphy practically has a seat on the board. Why deliberately invite the lightning to strike? 3-4 people in one central location and a small number of customers for whom good service can be demonstrably given, that's how I'd start out. Simple and eminently more manageable. Once this has been *proven* to work, and the various painful startup lessons learned, then it could be cautiously and conservatively scaled up. As I said, I don't think we should be fooled into thinking that our success as a distributed project can be trivially leveraged into success as a distributed commercial organization. The challenges are entirely different, and if a commercial org dropped even 1/10 of the number of issues on the floor as we do now (and can afford to, since we're not charging anyone any money), it'd be dead meat in 6 months - the founders bankrupt and the project's reputation perhaps irrepairably damaged. Tread carefully, I beg of you! Don't let idealism, no matter how well-intentioned, overshadow good sense here! Jordan
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