Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:09:37 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1018274463.3edac7@mired.org> Cc: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix Message-ID: <3CAB6181.F80D547E@mindspring.com> References: <20020402113404.A52321@lpt.ens.fr> <3CA9854E.A4D86CC4@mindspring.com> <20020402123254.H49279@lpt.ens.fr> <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15530.6987.977637.574551@guru.mired.org> <012601c1dadb$104d5100$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15531.2846.277278.29276@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Meyer wrote: > > > No, what makes a product successful is selling > > > lots of copies. > > You can only sell lots of copies if you can keep your technical support > > costs down. That imposes an upper limit on the number of bugs you can ship. > > And that limit is considerably lower than you seem to believe. > > Microsoft find a way around that. They offload the tech support costs > onto the supply chain. They can therefore ship products with basically > unlimited numbers of bugs, and are more than happy to do so. It's even more clever than that: treat technical support as a profit center, and charge people for it. Then introduce bugs intentionally, which have unique symptoms, and are easily resolved. Then hire high school students, and build the solution to the problem into a keyword associative database, so that you build knowledge of how to resolve the problems into the system, rather that into individual human beings. Then when people call, charge them $35 per incident, and each incident takes 15 minutes for the high school student to resolve, at $8 and hour, and you net $132 per hour per high school student. The more bugs you introduce, the higher your profits. The only "upper bound" is the hard limit on the number of high school students that are available. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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