Michael Perry wrote:
Quoting Evil Linux on Sun, May 30, 1999 at 01:27:28PM -0700:
I seemed to be one of the lucky ones. I sent three emails and three weeks later I received one reply back. I have also tried to call the tech support phone number, but with little success. Personally I do not feel I am getting my money's worth by paying for the package.
Not to sound confrontational, but how much did you spend for the package and what do you consider to be the requisite technical support you should get? If you spend $40 on 5 cd's of software, what level of technical support do you think you should get? I am just curious about what return on investment you think would be adequate. Let me say, I rarely send technical support email. I have used SuSE since 5.0 with some brief forays to the land of red hats. My primary location for technical support and expertise with the operating system is this mailing list and the mailing list archives. I respect SuSE and I like what they do; I just do not depend on them to provide tech support. If I did, perhaps I would feel that what they charge should carry some quick response service level support. Then again, perhaps not and I would do what I have done. Primarily experiment, make mistakes, learn, make more mistakes, and learn more. Also drop a few emails to some notable luminaries on this list.
I'm not flaming or arguing. Just commenting...
I have a lot of sympathy for this view and I hate it when people complain about not getting value for money when they only spent 40 bucks. OTOH, people like myself who are prepared to RTFM and search the list archives and the web for answers and even experiment to a degree sometimes still end up with no other recourse but to report the fault to the distributor and ask for their help. Given all the work you've put in by that point, it is extremely disturbing to find either that you are being completely ignored or that you are being given the brush off because they won't support the system once you've compiled your own kernel. For $40 we can expect only a limited amount of support, but some of us aren't even getting that. When you've taken the time to investigate the problem thoroughly and have documented it all for them with example input and output etc. it's only fair to expect a slightly more co-operative response. After all in doing this we are helping them to refine their product. SuSE must be prepared to stand behind their product if they expect to retain any credibility. If that means they have to charge a little more then so be it. But the current policy is certain to lose them customers. I for one will be looking very carefully at the support angle from now on when choosing distributions. -- rclark@virgosolutions.demon.co.uk Ralph Clark, Virgo Solutions Ltd (UK) __ _ / / (_)__ __ ____ __ * Powerful * Flexible * Compatible * Reliable * / /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / *Well Supported * Thousands of New Users Every Day* /____/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ The Cost Effective Choice - Linux Means Business! -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the archive at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>