Many companies — especially those that sell so-called “enterprise” products — make a big deal out of support services. Many software companies even make their products free or greatly inexpensive, capitalizing instead on support services. Such a reliance on profitable services over profitable products have led to two terrible plagues in the software world: insufficient documentation and non-intuitive interfaces.
When I think of companies that make a big deal out of support services, I think of Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and IBM. Now consider the operating systems these companies produce or sell — Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and AIX (among others for IBM). Ever used one of these OSes? Red Hat and Solaris are especially infuriating for people who come from the BSD realm and are used to decent or excellent integrated documentation. It’s much easier to figure out how to configure and operate a Web server on, say, FreeBSD or Gentoo Linux than it is on Solaris. How do you even install new software in Solaris? There is no easy way to figure that out without going to the Web. Red Hat Enterprise Linux looks like it should be configured through graphical tools, but in reality if you need to do serious configuration work, you’re going to hit the command line. Makes you wonder why people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a product that is not any easier to configure than free-of-charge Linux distros.
Support — that’s why! — support! Because the product is so difficult to use that you need to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in subscription fees on an annual basis so that when your underqualified system administrator does not know how to do something that should be obvious or easy to discover, he can call up the product support department and talk to an expert. To a certain extent, I can’t argue with this approach because it seems to make a lot of money for these software companies. On the other hand I strongly disagree with it because this business model impels the company to create products that are difficult to configure or use. It says, in effect, that their products are so poorly designed that you need to pay company-trained experts to tell you how to operate them properly. Or you pay even more money to send your sysadmin to product training and certification classes so that he doesn’t have to use the support options as often.
It’s sad to think that the easier a product is to use and configure, the less money it will make. The one thing the proprietary software model used to be really good at was encouraging the development of excellent and intuitive products. Today, proprietary products are released with known bugs, and users purposefully wait until after service packs and patches are released so that “the bugs are worked out” before they buy them. The focus on quality is gone, due in part to the unmanageability of a large codebase by a small group of developers, and in part because of increasing time-to-market pressures. Another part of this, I’m sure, is due to competition from open source software, which is generally free to download and use without much restriction. The successful open source companies though, as mentioned above, are not really motivated to make superior products because that’s not what they are selling. So where is the quality in software development anymore? Perhaps it is left only to small volunteer open source projects that have realistic release goals and a real drive to create something useful.
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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.