Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:18:13 -0400 From: dennis <dennis@etinc.com> To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> Cc: "Kevin P. Neal" <kpneal@pobox.com>, Stephen Roome <steve@visint.co.uk>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970420131810.006a1164@etinc.com>
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At 01:48 PM 4/20/97 -0300, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>On Sun, 20 Apr 1997, dennis wrote:
>
>> yeah, but LL Bean doesnt have to field tech support calls for
>> its customers, now do they?
>>
>> Selling one low-end card to someone overseas whos going to constantly
>> need tech support is a losing proposition. Sometimes, and I know that most
>> of you folks won't get this, its a business decision to send someone on
their
>> way.
>
> Ran an ISP way back when, with >5000 clients that paid alot less then
>your 'low-end card', and we never 'sent someone on their way'...and I'd
imagine,
>in alot of cases, your one client needing constant tech support knew more
>about what he was doing then about 95% of our 5000 clients *shrug*
Perhaps your tech support people dont make $200. per hour? The difference
is that an
ISP takes on VOLUME in order to make profits, much like insurance companies
assume
a certain pct of people that wont ever call. The more customer we take on, the
more diluted the support for our existing customers. When you call us you
still get
me most of the time....and although you may not like me, you'd be hard
pressed to
find someone who said I couldnt help him. If you want some $20./hr tech
support guy
to handle your problems I can give you a real good deal on a card. But you
cant get
someone for that price that knows how frame relay works or can debug a ppp
negotiation problem. I'm amazed at the number of ISPs that dont even know how
to do simple things...I had to set up my brothers Win'95 dial-in (took
about 5 min) because
his ISP gave him all of the wrong info and had no clue how to do it ('95
was fairly new, but
not THAT new, at the time)...you get what you pay for, most of the time.
db
>
>Marc G. Fournier
>Systems Administrator @ hub.org
>primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary:
scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org
>
>
>
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