Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Have you ever spend hours/days jumping through the hoops,  painstakingly collecting data on a problem and find out that the others had the problem and done all this before? If only you could have had access to this hugely valuable information base, you’d save hours/days and minimize down time?

Quality of support has long been used against open source software, suggesting that enterprises need an entity to deal with that is accountable to them. Fair enough, even though the mailing lists can be more responsive than some support organizations, enterprises require more assurance. This issue is largely resolved since there are now open source companies providing support for most open source products. The fact that this is still being tossed around as a concern is annoying to say the least but c’est la vie.

What irritates me more is that how inferior proprietary vendor support systems can be due to specifically their closed nature. Most bugs/problems are experienced by multiple users/customers and problems that are difficult to isolate can take a lot of time and effort.

Support information (generated by customers) is mostly locked inside enterprise systems, and not visible/searchable by the public or even the customers. Correlation of the problems reported by the users, their troubleshooting journey, the problems encountered on the way, gotchas, etc. all stay hidden from rest of the people.

In my experience, most people prefer using self help tools and research themselves before calling support unless there is an emergency.  If the customers could search/access to this information, not only the customers would save time and may be reduce down time, but the vendor would also benefit from reduced support costs since fewer support calls would come in. Even further, customers may even be able to avoid problems altogether by learning from experiences of others.  So why is this information not accessible, available at least by the customers?

• tools may be inadequate. The support systems may not naturally facilitate this type of sharing and collaboration
• vendors may not want this information out in the open for “competitive reasons”, keep dirty laundry hidden so to speak
• support information may include sensitive information that customer may not want to be public
• others.. ?

Open source products by their nature are more transparent, the problems are reported and discussed out in the open in mailing lists, bug tracking systems, forums, etc.  hence Google is ready to help you find the answers.  Vendors -open source or otherwise- should make the effort to make the support process as transparent as possible, the cost of keeping this information locked inside isolated systems is just too high. Open source companies have an opportunity here to differentitate themselves in yet another way that directly impacts the customer experience.