how does buying opera fix any troubles you have? all it would do for a person in need of support would be to make their situation much more complex by making them deal with both A) the trouble they were already having, AND B) migrating to a new browser. what a great answer!

but you are probably just a troll.

End users don't use this sort of service. Large corporations, who standardise on one piece of software will standardise on Mozilla then sign a yearly, flat rate contract with the company providing support.

As for "technical support". Technical support isn't a tutoring service, but some people treat it that way. The fact remains that if you want to learn how to use a piece of software, read the fucking fabulous manual! It is really that hard?

And when they have a problem in Opera, what do they do?

"There's a reason why this is so expensive: a typical telephone support call takes almost 30 minutes."

i would imagine 99% of people who use the call in support are indeed corperate users.

Problems can be solved by email. Some standard problems only take a short reply to fix, others can take several emails and a lot of time. If this is professional support, the $40 are very well warranted, but OTOH, I doubt there are too many takers.

I do wish them success, however, since Mozilla will profit, both from having support (there is a real demand, I know that for a fact), and making money off of it.

As Doron (who worked at Netscape, and therefore knows about this stuff) points out in another comment, this _is_ for end users. Your $40 will get you support from call centre staff who will work through a script and give you an answer out of their support database. Having someone who knows what they're talking about doing support costs more (as someone mentioned - Microsoft VB support calls are hundreds of dollars, not $40).

I do know people that would use this kind of thing - the same kind of people that will pay me GBP60 ($100) to pop over to their house and remove the blaster worm. There's also several small businesses that have either paid me to pop in and sort something out, or phoned me up to ask how to do something. I'm sure I'm not alone here in being called on for some technical knowledge... For those (well-off) people or businesses who don't know someone who knows someone who can help, they might do this.

Actually, I think the stock answer will be "thank you for the bug report...[taps away on Bugzilla to search for it]..." followed by either "that problem has already been reported - it's Bugzilla bug #X and if you register on Bugzilla, you can vote for it" or "that problem has been fixed as of <some date> - you can either download a nightly build of Mozilla or wait for the next milestone release of Mozilla which is due in <some rough guess>" or "this is a new bug report, we'll report it to the developers via Bugzilla, thank you" (the $40 would therefore save you having to enter it in Bugzilla yourself).

Of course, if you have the spare time (corporate tech staff probably don't), you can investigate Bugzilla yourself and save $40 - that's the swings and roundabouts of charging users support.

Hey, that's good money! At least they don't live in India, or they'll be paid even less.

As I said, I don't think $40 for a support call is unreasonable - it can often take quite a bit of time to play 20 questions with a clueless user and figure out what's happening (and most likely what they're doing wrong). You could also meter it by time rather than by call but that complicates things slightly. For many paid products, the reason that some limited amount of support appears cheaper than that is either because it isn't telephone support (much more expensive than email support for example) or because the price is predicated on most users never needing the service, so that it appears much like an insurance policy (most people who buy it never actually use it).

As to who would use such a service, probably rather few technical users. As you say, there are other alternatives available if you have a lot of technical contacts or a bit of time and technical resourcefulness. Those are precisely what a lot of end-users don't have - they may not be stupid, but their specialty is not in computers and they just don't have a lot of contacts and resources. Perhaps their time is limited.

I don't know if such a service could make a go of it or not - the biggest problem would be that many of the people who would need it the most would have no easy way to find out about it. I don't think it's absurd on its face though. Probably the main way the service providers could make money would be with support contracts from businesses; however many of the larger businesses have in-house support personnel who might be able to handle many of those kinds of questions. (It's hard for any service bureau to support every piece of software that's out there however - so some businesses with internal service desks might still find such a contract worthwhile).

We shall see. However I think the people who think this is an absurd idea are showing their ignorance of the general user population and of business in general.

--Bruce

I gotta chime in here... Don't get so uptight about it! If you don't wanna pay, DON'T!

Look - if you know how to use it and fix it, don't be upset. I used to do Netscape Tech Support for Decision One and the vast majority of the end users calling us (99.9%) fit into one of three categories:

1) they don't want to read anything to help them fix it, 2) they don't have time to read anything to help them fix it, 3) they were stupid and it wouldn't have done any good to read anything to help them fix it...

As an example we had ZERO Linux tech support calls because Linux users know how to deal with issues... OK? Little old grannies that wanted to keep in touch with the grand-kids at college or people looking for an alternative to the megacorporations running everything are the ones that called us. $39.95 is a small amount to pay when the product itself is free and something is either not working right, or you just don't want to mess with researching it for yourself, or you don't know where to start! The techs don't know everything about the software, but do any of you know everything about Mozilla? If they don't know the answer they'll look for it, but in the end if they help you out, you get charged because it's a service, not a product... If it's something they obviously won't be able to help with right up front, you get a refund. But if it takes 45 minutes to determine your Temp folder was full of garbage and that's the reason you couldn't send email, then yes, they helped you and you get the bill.

And as a last note, companies usually did not call us. It was individuals that wanted help. Netscape users are fiercely loyal to Netscape, and hated both Microsoft and AOL, but they hated Microsoft more so they stuck with Netscape, and indirectly AOL. I would highly recommend telling all those users about the alternative to Netscape - MOZILLA! It doesn't have all the AOL stuff included in the installer so they'll probably love it even more.

Besides, the company that will be supporting it has to charge to pay the grunts on the phones. Don't hate them because they want a job...

Baj