Unix Support or lack thereof (Re: '386 Unix Wars)

[John G. DeArmond]

>Well... look at it another way.  Support personel are expensive.
>Development people are expensive (as are all the people to back them up:
>production, documentation, sales, managers, internal support, hardware
>maintainance, etc.).  So... would you rather have to pay $8000 for a single
>license, and get the support you want, or pay $1000, and get somewhat
>limited support?  Note that people at SCO and ISC *do* read this group, and
>some of them (us) are very protective towards their (our) respective
>products.  While not everyone has access to usenet, it *is* something.
>(I've also gotten email from people who had other people give them my name,
>and I do try to help.  It's not my highest priority, but it is something I
>pay attention to.)

[on my soapbox]

Then pay attention to this.  That red herring you run up regarding
support stank in the CP/M days, it stank in the DOS days and it
especially stinks with Unix.  Quite frankly we as customers and
developers don't give a fiddler's damn how much support staff or
development staff or marketing staff or the front office receptionist
cost.  That's all a part of doing business.  If you can't run with the
big boys, don't get off the porch as the old saying goes. One could even
note that support costs would be minimal if the original product
exhibited a modicum of quality.  A company does not have to support
non-existant bugs.  

Support is integral to the whole product.  If someone at ISC or SCO
wanted to see how support makes a product, have someone take a
millisecond's look at WordPerfect sometime.  Though I consider WP to be a
terrible word processor, the quality of the package and the support make
me recommend it to my clients. Look at what you get for your couple of
hundred bucks: 

*	Totally free tech support
*	UNLIMITED tech support even if it qualifies as hands holding.
*	Even an 800 number to get it from.
*	Enough well prepared documentation that most people don't need support.
*	A program that runs on just about anything that will boot DOS or Unix
	and that will drive just about any device hooked to it capable of putting
	ink on paper.

And ISC or SCO tries to tell us that they can't provide a fraction of the
quality for many times the dollars?  Bullshit!  Either of these products 
would be laughed off the pages of any magazine that reviewed them to the
same standards as DOS products. 

Before the SCO or ISC cheerleaders try to note that Unix is bigger or
more complicated, consider that about 90% of Unix comes already written
from AT&T.  I'd lay odds that WP has written more original code for its
product than both of the Unix vendors put together. 

The problem is that both SCO and ISC started small, are small and will 
remain small because they think small.  It's a small minded attitude that
makes a company think that they have to nick every customer for every
dollar that it can.  Perhaps someone at either company should take an
evening and read a Drucker book on quality sometime. 

>>[bug fixing] is something I should be able to get for free, since I paid for a>>WORKING package, not "15 diskettes with whatever happens to be on them". 

>For the most part, I agree.  However, if you are the only customer
>experiencing this panic, and it is not readily reproducible, why should a
>company spend thousands of dollars to fix it?  I know it sounds callous, but
>money has to come from *somewhere*.  And, of course, see the comment about
>SCO's SLS's above.

That's the attidude that will guarantee that when a Unix company comes
along that understands service, these two companies will find themselves
about as relevant as Digital Research is now.  As surprising as it may
seem, a user or developer does not really give a damn how many others are
having panics or how many dollars it takes to fix it.  If it takes HIS
machine(s) down, it is a fatal flaw.  Is it going to take getting lawyers
involved to force a change? 

While we're on the subject of bug fixes, why do you suppose it is that
ISC cannot fix the damn Inode bug?  The bug had been explained to them on
the net.  There have been binary patches posted to the net.  And still
the  bug persists even in versions hot out of the box.  If their "high
priced" technical help cannot fix a bug for which a solution has been
handed to  them on a silver platter, what does that say about other
aspects of the product.  And why can't they fix uugetty or write a asy
port driver that  that works?  Why can I write a uugetty in an evening
that DOES work and they can't fix it at all?  Why does FAS exist and ISC
not at least take  a peek at how to do it right?  

And why can't they make the boot process look at the hardware and post at
least a semi- intelligible error message when problems are found instead
of simply locking up?  After all, the DOS guys have been doing this for
oh, what, 10 years or so.  And why can't the SCSI disk driver make at
least a weak attempt at error recovery rather than throwing up its hands
in panic?  Could it not figure out that a "media change sense error" on a
hard drive might just be spurrious and maybe, just maybe retry the
operation and see what happens?  Oh, I  guess they think we all like to
sit around for the 30 minutes it takes for a GB of disk to fsck.  Yeah,
there's the answer!  

It can't be that they don't have time to fix any of this stuff.  If they
were that overworked, they would not have time for such trivial stuff
as auth.  So the answer has to be that they just don't give a damn.

These guys are doing the same thing with Unix as IBM did with the PC.
They're killing their own product with callousness toward their 
customer base and are just daring others to fill the void.  I say godspeed
to anyone who decides to take advantage of this opportunity.

I recommend ISC to my clients now as the lesser of the evils but I'll flip
in a New York second to any company that discovers that service is something
more than a few glory words printed in a brochure.

(A word to anyone from Kodak - Hey guys, how about taking a look at this 
little company and injecting some of the quality I've come to know in 
your film and chemicals?  Do us all a favor and kick some ass.)

[Off my soapbox now]

John

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC        | "Purveyors of speed to the Trade"  (tm)
Rapid Deployment System, Inc. |  Home of the Nidgets (tm)
Marietta, Ga                  | "To be engaged in opposing wrong offers but 
{emory,uunet}!rsiatl!jgd      |  a slender guarantee of being right."