It's funny how often software is priced according to the anticipated support burden, but users feel entitled to support regardless of the price. I once worked at a financial analytics software company and our end users were non-technical, but paid about 2K a month for a username and password, and very often the users were kind and apologetic in their support requests. I also have a personal software product that costs $5/mo with a free trial, and many people trialing it are quite impatient and high maintenance. My take-away: if you are setting yourself up for an end-user support role, make sure it's priced accordingly.
users feel entitled to support regardless of the price
Pathological customers are disproportionately attracted to low price points. Your post jives with the experience of literally dozens of companies which have told me the same thing: the more you charge, the better your customer pool will be at everything. They'll read better. They'll have a better understanding of, ahem, engineering reality. They'll be more patient. They'll have less viruses and hard disk failures. They'll be better at using the Googles. etc, etc
It could be possible that when a person spends more for an item or service, they tend to value it more. They may also be more committed to it, whatever that means.
Reminds me of Dan Ariely's (and many other's) behavioral economics research.
It's a bit of a long leap but I've noticed that the clients we do discounts to always end up being really high maintenance, some even destroying their websites. On the flip side, the clients spending big money are always great to work with and generally let us do our thing. They always require less support.
There must be a deeper basis behind this. Some kind of psychology behind pricing. I've noticed it everywhere I turn.
One particulary interesting case was the packaging on Tesco (large supermarket chain the UK) branded toilet paper. It said it was just as strong and soft as Andrex, the leading brand. Andrex is much more expensive but still remains the leading brand!
I've actually been toying with this thought for a while and now it warrants much further investigation.
Good point. My thought is that, the $5 budget apps are actually paid for by the person using it whereas the big budget items (say $2000 software) are paid for (or negotiated) by the indirect purchasing departments. The end users don't actually pay it themselves which could also be part of the psychology as to why they aren't so 'demanding' so to say.
True, but there is another thing. With big deals you normally define support very clear in the contract. With smaller deals companies don't feel the urge to do this.
But it's very simple to say: "This product is cheap because it lacks quick response times for support".
Most customers won't have a problem with that.
I've found this is due to the difference between small-to-medium business and enterprise customers.
Once you pass a certain price point, you are generally dealing with an enterprise. This means 1) they are spending Other People's Money and 2) they are more likely to be accustomed to a professional environment.
I have to be honest and say that this isn't true in the scenario I describe. They're all dentists who own dental practices - the ones we cut deals & make discounts to are the ones who generally give the most pain.
The whole point in offering the discount is destroyed due to the financial cost of the headache involved.
A few years ago we raised our prices substantially and that reduced to near zero the number of nasty pre-sales support requests (we have a demo for download). So yes, higher paying customers are generally nicer. We also had a case similar to the OP where some guy kept emailing us for months because we didn't solve some problem he had even though it wasn't directly related to our product.
I know a few people who used to work for Loot, the free ads paper.
People would call if there was an error in their ad. Companies who had paid for their ads were almost always calm and polite, people who got a free ad for a small value item were sometimes very rude or aggressive.
Back when I worked at a small retail computer store, I never ceased to be amazed by silly old men (and they were almost complete carbon copies of each other) who would drive an F250 pickup for an hour to save $5 on a mouse (our loss leader) and then do it again to come back and complain.
My favorite incident was when my boss offered the guy a cash refund. That wasn't good enough. My boss offered him the refund, and let him keep the mouse for free just to get him out of the store. He smiled, finally satisfied, and then asked to buy another one.
It gets funnier. The loss leader was one per customer. The guy actually argued that because he had gotten the refund and was given the original for free, it didn't count as a sale and he was still entitled to buy the "one per customer".
We had to pick up the phone and start "calling the police" to get him out of the store. He lectured us on how there was no way we could stay in business by refusing to accept people's money.
There are some days I wonder if all humans are sentient.
If a person appears, offering me a solution to get me to my destination, leads me down their ally, taking my time and attention and meaning I lose the opportunity to check other solutions, and at the end of the ally I fall into a muddy riverbank and see a sign saying 'TODO: build bridge', we wouldn't call that a gift, we'd call it deceitful and cruel (or worse).
You don't owe me your work, but I don't owe you gratitude for it either. It's not a gift, it's not even that transactional. (Although that's no excuse for being nasty or threatening!)
With an open source project, it's unlikely that a person will appear and offer you anything and lead you down any alley. If you're trying to cross a river and come by a raft and start whining about the lack of a bridge, let alone saying that someone wasted your time, you're ungrateful.
"TODO: build bridge" means that the author thought that it's a good idea to build a bridge, however the author has other priorities and has postponed the bridge building to the time that it's actually needed (perhaps by someone else). Now you stumble by in need of a bridge, what should you do? Build the damn bridge, of course.
You're not owing any gratitude to anyone, but badmouthing someone for not doing exactly what you want is plain bad behavior.
There's a difference between finding a raft (here's some source on github which takes a few minutes to look at) and being enticed by a bridge (here's a homepage showing up in search results, presenting a packaged solution as an answer to the problem I'm having, which doesn't turn out to be a problem until hours or days of integration work).
When you're doing commercial product development, don't use "gifts". The FOSS tool/product may be very nice, very thorough, and all kinds of other wonderous "and it's free too!" adjectives; remember that it is, as the article says, a "gift": its creator and maintainer is under no obligation to ensure your needs are met. It may overall be a tremendous tour-de-force, but remember there is one key difference between FOSS and commercial software: there are small, ugly, uninteresting BUT IMPORTANT parts which NOBODY wants to do short of a serious paycheck. When your product comes to rely on those parts, will fixing problems prompt a "ok, I'll put 3 engineers on overtime to get it done" or "I'm at the beach; be happy with what you've got - it's a gift, remember?"
Yes, but have you had any commercial vendor say "Ok, I'll put 3 engineers on it"? Unless there are 100 other customers with the same problem you have, your bug report will be put on the list that they'll eventually get to in a month or 6.
For commercial products, your only option is to threaten to pull your business. Since it would probably cost thousands or tens of thousands to fix your problem, unless you are a big customer or the problem affects a lot of other customers, your problem will not be a priority.
For open source, you have the following options:
- ask the author to fix it. This works surprisingly well, if you're polite.
- post a question to the projects mailing list, and you will usually receive a response
- fix it yourself
- pay somebody to fix it
- pay the original author to fix it
Notice that there is ALWAYS a potential solution. Sometimes it's expensive, but for commercial software, too often you are SOL.
He didn't "appear". You came across a guy lashing together a raft, for his own use, demanded a bridge, and then became irate that he didn't pull apart his raft and make you one right then and there.
Worse still, the poor guy offered to let you use his raft if you wanted to. Its not his fault you were moving elephants.
Not quite. He listed his raft-building skills on the internet, told you where the raft-building party was, all in an environment where folks make good money on raft consulting.
Then the guy says "I don't do the hard part, go away"
'Gift' is a word I wish I saw more often in the vicinity of 'open source'. I love open source software. I love that there can be a community around any project, no matter how small. It's a powerful philosophy.
But I wish more people would understand the differences between 'free' and 'open source'. Open source software is not free. Huge companies invest millions of dollars into open source projects that you probably use. Time is money.
Looking at is as a gift not only makes you understand the generosity with which the author(s) has open sourced their code, but when I think about it like that I see that there are real people behind the code and that they should be treated as such.
I am always disappointed when I see people complain (with a negative tone) about a library, whether it's missing documentation or an unstable API or whatever, without contacting the author of the library and asking how's the project doing or would the author need some help. Sometimes the author is burdened by other projects or paying work but would probably appreciate any contact from fellow developers or potential users to discuss/plan ahead the project. A little positive feedback or a few pull requests from strangers makes good things happen.
in short: It's open source. You're a coder. Fix it.
Honestly I'd like to see the e-mails that were sent if only for personal amusement.
I have so much respect for those that work on open source projects. If you think about it there isn't much on the web today that isn't in some way touched by some open source code.
I've been once on the other side of the "be nice, it's a f####ng gift" situation.
I had a subscription at a local telecom company, which provided both telephony and broadband internet. I went and cancelled the subscription in July 2010, and almost a year later, in June 2011 I get called by a repo company asking for $20.
After a few calls, I find out that the telecom company issued one more bill, 3 months after I cancelled. Apparently, they gave me for free when I cancelled another 3 free months of phone subscription, which automatically extended the broadband internet connection. Arguing with them over the phone (I had left the country by then) I got this exact reply: "It's a f####ng gift, be nice! What's your problem?"
The way this works in my country (Romania), if you don't pay up, you either have to sue them to prove you don't have to pay, or you get reported to the credit bureau so you won't get any loans from any bank for the next few years. Sadly, I ended up paying ...
Disgraceful, and I'm sure illegal. Now that Romania is in the EU, you should see how much of the EU Customer rights laws have been implemented into your national law. Since Romania joined the EU recently, most of these laws are probably new, and hence companies probably not be aware of them.
(Probably no help to you now in this case, but for future reference)
One time, on my (free) browser game, we banned a user for gross misbehaviour. A few mails went back and forth between him and me, ending up with him threatening to "sue us into the ground", and his dad was "a lawyer" so he was sure he'd win. I replied something along the lines of "sure, whatever" and never heard back.
I suspect you'd also have this sort of thing with a paid product. The only difference is that you'd have to go out of your way to placate the person, as he would be a customer.
In a way, it does make sense. In web design and developer communities; there's a saying that if you give an inch, they want a mile. They are not good clients to work with.
While it's very appreciated what those guys did, they should've ignored the aggressive support request.
I value such free support and very thankful even if it was a ruthless "Go check maxmemory" response to "How does Redis handle bigger data than memory assigned?". Thank them for the response, even if it wasn't the solution. It's appreciated.
I admire the respectful way that he handles communication with the difciult party, and becomes helpful on another level. I'd like to be better at dealing with the world like that.
This doesn't even apply only to software, generally. My company sell specially tailored storage servers, and we almost gave up on cheaper systems ( < 2000 euros) because they concentrate most of the support problems, questions and rants.
In fact, we have one customer buying us cheap systems (1500 euros) by the hundreds. We have very, very little problems with them. We have another customer with a whole bunch of big systems and a couple of small ones for tests, etc. No problem either.
So it confirms that it's not so much the cheap system per se than the cheap customer which comes with problems.
I wonder how much of the anecdata being relayed here is a result of selective perception? We don't really remember the cases where a freeloading customer went away at the first "no", or where a well-paying customer received the red carpet service treatment. The high-maintenance cheapskates stick out in mind because they're the exceptions, but perhaps they're not quite so common as they might seem.
My first job out of college was in a support centre, supporting voice recognition software: an early ancestor of Siri if you like! One weekend without our knowledge, the parent company stuck a prior version of the software onto a free bundle cd that came with a PC magazine in the UK... a great marketing move sure, but the amount of calls we got as a result of that free software was incredible. People can get irate when voice recognition software doesn't work as well as they expect (for a variety of reasons, generally either hardware or accent related!), but with this free version, people really lost the run of themselves altogether... some of the calls we took that week were from some very angry people indeed!
The writer of this article summed up this confusing paradox quite well by offering a refund... for this free item... which was a gift!
This is really interesting in the context of the whingeing about Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity. One part of me absolutely agrees with the OP, but another part of me thinks that in a specific case like Ubuntu 11.10, Canonical, with their Ubuntu gift, do have a responsibility to their installed base. Is there some line related to project size (or something else) that means users _do_ have a legitimate expectation of adequate support?
