Vendor “Support”
Maybe I’m in a foul mood today but that as it may be I’m sick of buying non-existent vendor support. My vendor for phone software is proving they don’t know how to earn the $6k in support subscriptions I pay for annually. In the past 2 months I’ve now opened 4 incidents with my reseller and the only one that has been resolved is the one I figured out on my own. The worst part is I conceptually know where the problems are or what they are based on the error message yet they have repeatedly asked nonsense questions when I ask for a status update - like they needed this answered first and now it’s my fault it’s not fixed for not providing some inconsequential piece of information. I’m sure the can get away with this with their run of the mill users - but I’m frankly fed up!
In the open source software world one of the places a for-profit company can make money is supporting software they don’t even own. In this model if there is a demand there is a possibility of competition because the open source software can be supported by anyone. There isn’t a single vendor that a says “you must pay me 20% of the purchase price of your current installation to get support. Upgrades not included” then if you don’t pay for the “maintenance” they simply will not sell you an upgrade until you have paid all *maintenance* in arrears.
It is no wonder there is such a paradigm shift happening in the software/IT world.