I think for bidders to be able to get a feel for the sort of demand such services will have could you say approximately how many calls DecisionOne gets a month and how many of them have been resolved satisfactorily

Without my knowledge, one of my users called Decisionone for help with Mozilla. I really don't know exactly what my user said but Decisionone ended up telling him that his 128MB wasn't enough and not to run version 1.6 because only 1.5 was stable.

That seems like a pretty short timeframe. I mean, I am sure help companies may be able to just whip a proposal up but it seems that some Mozilla users may be interested in helping create a company with this thing and that would take a little bit of time. Even existing companies need a bit of time to create a proposal, realize who they are going to hire, etc. Two weeks just doesn't seem quite long enough for this type of thing.

I have an email from a Mozilla user who says when he called the phone support about a problem with one of his Mozilla 1.6 CDs, the phone support tech told him he was "stupid" for buying the CD, when you can download it for free.

I can only speak for myself, but I have so far handled 1100 emails from people looking for Mozilla support through my website. The majority (by far) of this arrived in the last year.

Not all messages are from different senders - some cases require several emails to resolve. If ecplained correctly (many novice users do need background information), resolving a case can take some time. Others, OTOH, are very easy and quick to answer.

One last comment: I do not explicitely mention on my site that people can contact me for their support needs (I just have a generic 'contact' page), so I guess that if I did this, volume would be considerably higher.

If support were free and prominently linked to from Mozilla.org's support page, I would guess the volume for whomever decides to offer official email support at around 500 messages per year (this is a very rough educated guess) . Peak times are usually when a new version is released, they are especially high when a new stable release comes out.

DecisionOne has plenty right to tell customers that 1.5 is more stable than 1.6. These are individual techs, who have the right to say whatever they please.

I am actually using 1.5 now and haven't bothered to upgrade. I am an end-user.

--Sam

Robert blogged about this (http://robert.accettura.com/archives/000342.shtml) and me too (http://www.axel-hecht.de/blog/archives/000100.html).

Where volunteers can submit telephone numbers, email addresses, expertise,availabilty etc.

Just an idea: Couldn't they just get this system http://www.helpcenterlive.com (it's GPL) and install it with a Support Link everywhere on their pages? Then all they'd need would be volunteers that would log onto it and handle support (either by live chat or by handling the trouble tickets that the users enter). You could even take it further and have for-pay 'agents' log in and work off the tickets/chat calls.

I have not been keeping up much with DecisionOne and their phone support for Mozilla. I was the manager for the team up until a week before we took on the support for Mozilla (the same team that did Netscape support). If you get bad advice from a tech it's probably not their fault, they got 0 (zero) hours of training in preparation for taking on Mozilla. Though they had a good base to start from by supporting Netscape prior to this. I really feel sorry for anyone trying to get support using Linux though and hope you got a refund if you requested one. That decision was made by the account manager at the time. Also when I left there was much talk (like in all technology sectors) of outsourcing much of the call volume and all of the email to India which I imagine has happened by now. I left the place over ethical issues dealing with that same account manager in relation to the Netscape contract and I have to say I am much happier now. (I got away from call centers and doing hands on full PC tech support now)

"I have an email from a Mozilla user who says when he called the phone support about a problem with one of his Mozilla 1.6 CDs, the phone support tech told him he was "stupid" for buying the CD, when you can download it for free." ---- I wish I had the name of that technician, I would call them up and ask them what the heck they were thinking even saying that to an end user. When I was there this kind of poor service was dealt with in a swift manner. Most of the techs try their best to relly help out the caller and do what they can.

"Without my knowledge, one of my users called Decisionone for help with Mozilla. I really don't know exactly what my user said but Decisionone ended up telling him that his 128MB wasn't enough and not to run version 1.6 because only 1.5 was stable." -----Again I hate to hear stuff like this, I don't want to bash anyone I used to work with but these kinds of answers are not what customers should be getting for paid support. I expected alot more out of my old team.

"decisionone just have lists of questions they go through and if they don't find any answer on this list, they just tell you some crap." -----Pretty close to the truth, the support documentation is and always has been sadly lacking, it is merely a compilation of information already available online to anyone willing to research it themselves.

I hate to leave names here, and honestly I don't know what he is up to these days but one of the best people I worked with in relation to Netscape (he also was a wealth of information about Mozilla) is a guy that worked Netscape support for years at DecisionOne prior to me working on the contract - Brian Jenkins. If I were ever going to get back to browser support I would definitely talk to him. He really took pride in the kind of service and information he gave. I wish he was still there now, it sound like DecisionOne could really use his help from what I have seen here.