On 1/6/2017 1:38 PM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
I worked at a midrange software house for more than 10 years. My
opinion about software support has been dramatically shaped by that.
There are good reasons for this
First it stops contract employees from getting a serial number at one
customer and using it at other customers (who may not have paid for support)
With a PC-based product like RDi, this is... not a good fit. What other
PC software is tied to the serial number of the server it connects to?
Second, since a very high percentage (My guess is > 85%) of the calls are
"how do I do this" or "I messed it up" as opposed to break/fix the number of
calls IBM would have to field would explode. Now IBM happily takes the "how
do I...." calls, they are not complaining, but there does have to some
limits.
Respectfully; very, very respectfully, there are several possibilities
for a high volume of 'how do I?' calls:
The product is broken.
The documentation is broken.
The sales channel is broken (wrong product for the market; wrong market
for the product).
I'm a professional software developer. I believe in my deepest soul
that all problems are solvable. But not until one sees that there is a
problem.
Perhaps Software Group could come up with a different way?
In my opinion, step 0 is to recognise that RDi is PC software, not
server software. Follow a licencing and support model like the rest of
the PC universe does.
But assume for the moment that the ship won't change course, and we're
all going to have to live with the licencing model we've got. Why not
put a 'Report This Bug!" button inside of RDi? The software could
verify immediately if you're on the current patch level (please upgrade)
and if you have a valid licence. Once verified, you could have it
record the screen / keystrokes while reproducing the problem, send the
lot off to Support and let the process flow. Copy the workspace, list
the environment variables, the OS version, you name it - it can be
captured by RDi itself. Heck, glue on some klunky annotation
capabilities like Jing has, and the programmer having the issue could
highlight her screen to help the debugging team.
If yer gonna dream, dream big.
Vernon Hamberg wrote
This is frustrating - entitlement and all really gets sticky here.
When one of the product's long time evangelists says this, it's a sure
bet that other people are badmouthing RDi - and turning adoption rates
lower.
midrange.com
