Hasta la Vista baby – free support required

Customer support is one of those nefarious ideologies that have often been put forward as the saviour of resellers – your fortune will be made if you charge for your support. But none of the proponents of the brave new service world take the time to explain just how you convince customers what should be ‘paid’ for and what they can expect to get for ‘free’. Naturally, they perceive much bias by resellers in favour of the former. Here at Rabid we naturally prefer a very short period of ‘free’ support.

But our customers are just like your customers and they want everything for nothing, just like that Dire Straits song about the price of CPU and RAM upgrades – Money for Nothing and Your Chips for Free. And now, right in the middle of fighting the good fight to convert the freeloaders into the basis for our ‘rivers of gold’ service model, Microsoft drops Service Pack One for Windows Vista. If this release was to have been managed any worse they’d have to have hired yours truly or the nephew.

Bleating to the media about your fabulous new fixup is all well and good, but leaving it off the Windows Update schedule was just plain odious. It took about 10 minutes after the news of SP1 hit the wires for the punters to hit ‘update’ and get nothing, before our phones started ringing off the hook. Regular readers will know it doesn’t take much to get the phones off the hook around here – we don’t exactly enjoy a reputation for instantaneous response. However, this was one time when we should just have gone out to lunch, or stayed there.

After discovering that you have to manually download the SP1 piggy, we blithely directed a few punters to the right place only to get abused about the sheer size of the thing and what this would do to Mr Johnson’s download allowance and how would young Johnny get his homework done? Same as always we said, bully the nerdy kid for a copy of his homework. But they did have a point. This thing is way bigger than a Paris Hilton phishing exploitation video and nowhere near as much fun – or so we’ve been told.

Those whose download allowance had sufficient wiggle-room to let them grab the service pack soon rang back after pressing ‘install’. Well, yes, it does take a little while, don’t you have something else you could be doing while you wait? Have you re-read War and Peace lately? Right, you did that before you rang. Yeah, we know, we didn’t think it would take this long either. Yes, yes, if it was this broken why didn’t they wait until now to release Vista in the first place.

Yes Sir, we do support the products we sell. Mostly. Uhuh. Yeah, OK, we did sell you Vista in the first place. Did we ever actually promise it was the best yet? Oh, we did? Do you have a recording of us saying that? Yes, we’re talking about one that would hold up in court, but why do you ask? Are we charging for this call? Would you like us to charge for this call? No need to be like that. No that won’t be necessary, the nephew has already been to the vet.

Do you think that maybe, just possibly or even perhaps, Microsoft might like to offer resellers a tiny rebate for their troubles? What’s that? Look outside? Where? Up in the sky?

No way!

Gotta go, pigs flying!

baby free hasta la required software support vista