> ...we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. I learned about engineering away support c

> ...we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. I learned about engineering away support costs from Robert McNeel & Assoc (RMA). They used to sell AutoCAD. The value added reseller racket is to slough off support costs onto their dealer channel, which Autodesk did shamelessly. (Probably learned from auto mfg.) RMA thought about revenue in terms of ROI and velocity. Instead of increasing margins, RMA reduced transaction costs. So RMA made AutoCAD add-ons, nominally low price but actually given away, to reduce support costs. Stuff like plot drivers which actually "just worked". Over time, customers learned that TOC working with RMA was lower and hassle-free. -- I applied this strategy as an engineering manager. I had inherited some products (necromancy) with a lot of technical debt. There was intense pressure to add features, restart the software upgrade revenue (long before subscriptions). I insisted on also chewing thru our hottest support costs. Burned A LOT of political capital and goodwill. (One of my rationales was that our small team simply didn't have the resources to manage the high support burden.) The intangible, unquantifiable benefit was that velocity improved for every one of our products. Each release got easier and proved more rewarding. It was like printing money. Our customers sold our products for us (word of mouth). So we saved even more money (less need for marketing). We somehow created a virtuous cycle. -- Back then, I had guessed that tech debt piles up because of suboptimal bookkeeping. The costs of poor quality were externalized. Meaning lazy, aloof devs cutting corners increased costs for QA and tech supp. And worse, negatively impacting sales and marketing. Today, I'm not so sure. Unifying dev and supp (DevOps) hasn't improved quality. Maybe poor quality is something like a natural law. Sturgeon's Law applied every where. The only big examples of aggressive continuous improvement I'm aware of are Musk (Tesla & SpaceX) and Haier. And probably Apple too. But it seems they attain their results by whipping their employees. Whereas back in the day, we improved quality by doing less work (taking the time to save time). FWIW, Sandy Munro of Munro & Assoc remains an outspoken proponent of 90s era concepts like quality, continuous improvement, "muda" (remove waste), etc. If any one has other links, resources for 3rd millennium era quality obsessives, please share.