anyone want to hire a coder?

[Alvin Oga]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> I have to say I'm scratching my head, and am not overly optimistic with
> what I can see in front of me.  Any imagewashing you'd care to do?

my view..

looks like they're selling Installation support for $795 for 30 day period
with 48hr turn around :-)
	- bad idea .. 

most commercial distro ( where you paid tehir list price vs the $5 CDs 
from other places ) offer free support on the phone for the first 30 days 

debian/fedora/suse provide free online updates :-) vs their $295 plan
or $995 plan ( paid annually )
	- bad idea ..

- the good idea, is that not everybody knows how to update/upgrade their
  PCs which are the folks you wanna keep away from your business servers
	( debian or suse or rh or fedora or 1000's-me-too )
 	- maybe their idea will work for these potential clients

- i think spikesource is trying to be like Dell's support model 

- from the hours of support, people in hawaii is sorta screwed :-)

- support is a good racket .. but how to get paying customers is the
  trick question and who else does the same thing for less and/or better

- bad part about "paid" support ..
	- if somebody charges $200/hr for support, there's always somebody
	else, equally competent, willing to do it for $100/hr or even
	$ 50/hr or even free because they are the friend of a friend

	- i like to argue the point, that the amt they charge should
	be the value of their services and background and knowledge
	vs someone that does it as a 1-time-deal 

- the good part about support ...
	- you get their next oopsies phone call or email 6mon or a year
	later with the same issue or other issues or ongoing is best


- "support" in my context ( world ) can be anything from coding to
  custom designed hw too

c ya
alvin