4 ms·

The point isn't to resolve user problems, it's to reduce the number of people taking up the time of support agents. Letting people vent in a pseudo-official cha

The point isn't to resolve user problems, it's to reduce the number of people taking up the time of support agents. Letting people vent in a pseudo-official channel accomplishes that. Whenever something gets resolved that was being fixed anyway, because the "industry partners", enterprise and high level customers wanted it, they can mark an issue as resolved, and generate the appearance of responsive service. It's like standing up complex automated phone menus, you're going to frustrate a certain number of callers into giving up, and reduce the overall number of customers you have to interact with. We need a scale reform for modern businesses - platforms and companies like Microsoft are logistically incapable of providing good service to their customers, or moderating hundreds of millions or even billions of users, effectively separating these companies from all the harm they cause. If you can't responsibly operate a business past a certain scale, you shouldn't be allowed to continue growth. I don't know what that looks like, legally speaking, but it's necessary, for what should be reasons obvious to everyone.

dotancohen 1y ago
> If you can't responsibly operate a business past a certain scale, you shouldn't be allowed to continue growth. I don't know what that looks like, legally speaking A legal solution is not the correct solution to that problem. The classic answer to this question in Western societies is that the market will produce a better alternative. For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution.
- 9dev 1y ago
  That’s a non-answer. The market very obviously did not produce a better alternative, and we’ve been playing this game for enough decades now to be reasonably confident it won’t—and if it will, Microsoft or some other megacorp will buy them, gut them, and carry on. Regulation is the proper tool to force corporations to behave in a way that isn’t as harmful to society. This is something that should be regulated. > For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution. It’s almost comical how you speak about better alternatives in the context of capitalist markets, where better means reaching a higher market saturation, and then offer a niche solution that has a number of users so tiny that it’s less than a rounding error in any statistic.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    This comment is almost unfathomable in a world where Windows and MacOS combined has a smaller install-base than Linux. The capitalists already chose their winners, they just never let down a rope to the consumer market.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Are you referring to Android?
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        I think he's referring to the fact that, while everyone jokes about "year of Linux on the desktop": In the last 30 years, we moved overwhelmingly from local workloads to internet workloads We moved overwhelmingly away from desktop and to mobile Android is the dominant mobile OS, and it's hand-in-hand with Linux at the kernel level The internet, meanwhile, is powered overwhelmingly by Linux So I tend to agree that just because normal folks think of "computing" as the Windows or Mac machine sitting in front of them, the world is now predominantly powered by Linux.
        1718627440 1y ago
        ... GNU/Linux smth. ...
        rpdillon 1y ago
        I generally appreciate the distinction, but I purposely did not use that distinction here because Android is only Linux if you don't include GNU.
        1718627440 1y ago
        The distinction is relevant here, because "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't refer to Android. The philosophy of "Linux" is that the user has control. That applies more to BSD than Android. Also it's "on the desktop".
- colpabar 1y ago
  There's another post on hn about how 19% of california homes are owned by investors, and when I saw that I thought to myself "wow, the free market really produced an optimal outcome there."
  - brobdingnagians 1y ago
    California housing market is not an example of a free market.
  - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
    In a truly free market even in California real estate would be pretty affordable. It's not affordable because there's so many laws that have been passed by people who are trying to protect the culture and value of their area. Like San Francisco, it's nearly impossible to build anything there.
- observationist 1y ago
  The market has failed. It's allowed massive monopolistic and anti-competitive scenarios to play out, and technology outran legislation like crazy. There are billions of people who are a victim of the failure mode I pointed out. You using an alternative (and being here, on this forum) singles you out as one of one in tens of millions of people with the capacity and knowledge to accomplish that. 25 years ago it made sense to let things play out. Now we're looking at ownership by subscription, and people unable to actually own their own devices, with constant, ubiquitous, global surveillance for all but the most wealthy, and even them most of the time. We see a proliferation of some of the worst possible things online, and companies that are unable and unwilling to effectively moderate their billions of users with resorting to heavy handed authoritarian tactics. Tactics which, when recognized by those in power, are quickly taken over and utilized for purposes far beyond anything so prosaic as "protecting children" or "combating terrorism." Apple and Microsoft and Google and the rest have shown us that the tech market is more or less just like the old steel and oil markets - robber barons rush in, coordinate, distill the market to a handful of effective players, capture regulation and lobby legislation to maximize their own profit, and there is no concomitant return of value to the users or the market in general. If you're too big to run the business responsibly, you should be legally prohibited from expanding further. This is about as pro-market as you can get, it requires actual unmet needs in any market to be met, and holds those operating in the market to account for their behavior.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    This failure is primarily due to regulatory capture, rather than a failed free market approach, for what it’s worth.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      You're going to need some actual citations for that narrative before anyone buys into it. The US refused serious regulation out of fear of stifling a fully-financialized economy. Now that America has no manufacturing capacity and a weak grasp on raw materials, our only lucrative businesses embrace exploitative subscription services, lock-in and planned obsolescence. Every economist in the US could have surmised that this would be an issue following the aforementioned oil/steel rackets. It just switched from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector of the economy.
- integralid 1y ago
  The solution to bad client support channels is... using open source software with no support? I don't think this works at all.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    > open source software with no support Open source means you have as much support as you like to have, because you are the support.
levkk 1y ago
Competition. Go build a better product.
- 9dev 1y ago
  At Microsoft scale, common market rules no longer apply. What would you even call their "product" that someone could improve upon? It’s a giant maze of offerings, competing interests, corporate and government relations, revenue streams… hoping for someone to disrupt this due to better support is like hoping for a country to displace the United States for their superior social systems. It’s nonsensical, that’s not how global mega-corporations work.
  - zer00eyz 1y ago
    Sooo you're never going to be able to do what MS did to IBM? You're never going to be able to do what AMD is doing to Intel?
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Well... being lucky enough to negotiate a fairly liberal licensing agreement with a tech juggernaut as MS did with IBM for something as critical as the OS? Not likely. AMD has been making chips literally for decades with investments in Billions. They had to spin their fab business off it was too expensive to keep up with. And even now, it's taken nearly a decade of competitive and leading products to make inroads, and even then they're still under 50% of x86 computers in use. Linux has been around over 30 years, and is just now cracking 5% desktop market share. This happens while Windows has become less than 10% of Microsoft revenue, with well over a decade of "free" upgrades. So, yeah, if you're able to get a company started... get billions invested... able to create compelling products without triggering literal mine-fields of IP and legislative restrictions... sure, you might be able to unseat a competitive mega corporation. But unlikely in anything resembling a lifetime measured in less than decades.
      - MichaelZuo 1y ago
        If it was easy enough to be even remotely feasible for average HN users then Microsoft would already be long gone. Because there are likely many many people in this world who had that thought before you.
zer00eyz 1y ago
> We need a scale reform for modern businesses - platforms and companies like Microsoft are logistically incapable of providing good service to their customers, or moderating hundreds of millions or even billions of users, effectively separating these companies from all the harm they cause. And here is where "you have to spend X number of days a year doing CS" should be a requirement for every engineer, dev, product manger, and executive. I do not think you understand the level of abject stupidity that customers are capable of. I do not think you understand how likely customers are to do dumb things and blame the company. Companies who provide support charge more for their products to pay for it. How much? Well how many people break things and then ask for refunds. The company pays for those people by marking up all the other products. IN any organization: first friend outside your team should be in accounting. The second should be in customer service. These are the most valuable resources you will have regarding the tempo of what is going on inside your organization. They are the front line and the oracles of "truth" (the books dont lie, unless your Enron' and then you have bigger problems).
- tracker1 1y ago
  I worked phone support for a while... I had a customer call about backing up their research paper they were working on (iomega, zip drive). After going back and forth for 20m or so, since the drive light wasn't on... Me: "Would you be able to pull the computer out into the light so that you can check the connection with better lighting instead of the flashlight?" Customer: "Not really, the power is out." I worked on the iomega side, second level support, mostly Jazz and OS/2 calls, knew it was going to be a doozy when I got a non-warm zip customer. MCI operated support call center in Chandler, AZ... pretty sure that's where Safelight Auto Glass operates now. Related: A buddy on the Compaq side of the call center got the infamous "broken cup holder" call. He could barely contain the laughter and popped up having to tell anyone at that moment about it.
zdc1 1y ago
The market has solutions to this, but they are mostly for businesses. E.g. You can purchase "support" either from Microsoft, or other third parties that will then deal with MS for you if they can't fix it themselves. And whatever software you buy also has it's own support terms too. (I've had good experiences with paid AWS support under both models.) On the flip side: if you're an individual, you're at a poker table with a $50 chip—you don't have leverage—you either just take the bet or don't. So you're basically forced to research the laptop/hardware/software you intend to run to verify it's a happy path, or it at least has vendors (or a local PC store) that will help you if something breaks, and hope for the best. So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support? Would people even pay for an OS anymore?
- jjani 1y ago
  > So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support? They're already doing so, just not receiving it. Microsoft made a yearly profit of 101 billion dollars, or better phrased, 101,000 million dollars. The solution isn't "the consumer pays more", it's "investors earn less".
  - eviks 1y ago
    How much of that was from the products discussed in these Q&As?
apparent 1y ago
I wonder if they will purposely train/instruct chatbot help agents to be a bit less helpful, to mimic the friction and frustration that phone trees and such create. Or perhaps they'll train them to be cheerfully helpful, but to just dump all the feedback in a virtual circular file. If so, would the chatbot admit this is what happens if the user asked them?
burnt-resistor 1y ago
> The point isn't to resolve user problems, it's to reduce the number of people taking up the time of support agents. Letting people vent in a pseudo-official channel accomplishes that. Whenever something gets resolved that was being fixed anyway, because the "industry partners", enterprise and high level customers wanted it, they can mark an issue as resolved, and generate the appearance of responsive service. Yep. It's like Whitehouse "petitions". Time-wasting tarpits for the unaware. > It's like standing up complex automated phone menus, you're going to frustrate a certain number of callers into giving up, and reduce the overall number of customers you have to interact with. The point of pointless troubleshooting procedures, long forms, long wait times, denials, and inconvenience is to monetize misery and create a maximally-negative conversion funnel. Ask any UnitedHealth or airline CEO.

dotancohen 1y ago

> If you can't responsibly operate a business past a certain scale, you shouldn't be allowed to continue growth. I don't know what that looks like, legally speaking A legal solution is not the correct solution to that problem. The classic answer to this question in Western societies is that the market will produce a better alternative. For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution.

9dev 1y ago
That’s a non-answer. The market very obviously did not produce a better alternative, and we’ve been playing this game for enough decades now to be reasonably confident it won’t—and if it will, Microsoft or some other megacorp will buy them, gut them, and carry on. Regulation is the proper tool to force corporations to behave in a way that isn’t as harmful to society. This is something that should be regulated. > For what it's worth, I'm typing this on my Debian desktop. In my opinion, a far better solution. It’s almost comical how you speak about better alternatives in the context of capitalist markets, where better means reaching a higher market saturation, and then offer a niche solution that has a number of users so tiny that it’s less than a rounding error in any statistic.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  This comment is almost unfathomable in a world where Windows and MacOS combined has a smaller install-base than Linux. The capitalists already chose their winners, they just never let down a rope to the consumer market.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Are you referring to Android?
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      I think he's referring to the fact that, while everyone jokes about "year of Linux on the desktop": In the last 30 years, we moved overwhelmingly from local workloads to internet workloads We moved overwhelmingly away from desktop and to mobile Android is the dominant mobile OS, and it's hand-in-hand with Linux at the kernel level The internet, meanwhile, is powered overwhelmingly by Linux So I tend to agree that just because normal folks think of "computing" as the Windows or Mac machine sitting in front of them, the world is now predominantly powered by Linux.
      - 1718627440 1y ago
        ... GNU/Linux smth. ...
        rpdillon 1y ago
        I generally appreciate the distinction, but I purposely did not use that distinction here because Android is only Linux if you don't include GNU.
        1718627440 1y ago
        The distinction is relevant here, because "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't refer to Android. The philosophy of "Linux" is that the user has control. That applies more to BSD than Android. Also it's "on the desktop".
colpabar 1y ago
There's another post on hn about how 19% of california homes are owned by investors, and when I saw that I thought to myself "wow, the free market really produced an optimal outcome there."
- brobdingnagians 1y ago
  California housing market is not an example of a free market.
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  In a truly free market even in California real estate would be pretty affordable. It's not affordable because there's so many laws that have been passed by people who are trying to protect the culture and value of their area. Like San Francisco, it's nearly impossible to build anything there.
observationist 1y ago
The market has failed. It's allowed massive monopolistic and anti-competitive scenarios to play out, and technology outran legislation like crazy. There are billions of people who are a victim of the failure mode I pointed out. You using an alternative (and being here, on this forum) singles you out as one of one in tens of millions of people with the capacity and knowledge to accomplish that. 25 years ago it made sense to let things play out. Now we're looking at ownership by subscription, and people unable to actually own their own devices, with constant, ubiquitous, global surveillance for all but the most wealthy, and even them most of the time. We see a proliferation of some of the worst possible things online, and companies that are unable and unwilling to effectively moderate their billions of users with resorting to heavy handed authoritarian tactics. Tactics which, when recognized by those in power, are quickly taken over and utilized for purposes far beyond anything so prosaic as "protecting children" or "combating terrorism." Apple and Microsoft and Google and the rest have shown us that the tech market is more or less just like the old steel and oil markets - robber barons rush in, coordinate, distill the market to a handful of effective players, capture regulation and lobby legislation to maximize their own profit, and there is no concomitant return of value to the users or the market in general. If you're too big to run the business responsibly, you should be legally prohibited from expanding further. This is about as pro-market as you can get, it requires actual unmet needs in any market to be met, and holds those operating in the market to account for their behavior.
- kulahan 1y ago
  This failure is primarily due to regulatory capture, rather than a failed free market approach, for what it’s worth.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    You're going to need some actual citations for that narrative before anyone buys into it. The US refused serious regulation out of fear of stifling a fully-financialized economy. Now that America has no manufacturing capacity and a weak grasp on raw materials, our only lucrative businesses embrace exploitative subscription services, lock-in and planned obsolescence. Every economist in the US could have surmised that this would be an issue following the aforementioned oil/steel rackets. It just switched from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector of the economy.
integralid 1y ago
The solution to bad client support channels is... using open source software with no support? I don't think this works at all.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > open source software with no support Open source means you have as much support as you like to have, because you are the support.

levkk 1y ago

Competition. Go build a better product.

9dev 1y ago
At Microsoft scale, common market rules no longer apply. What would you even call their "product" that someone could improve upon? It’s a giant maze of offerings, competing interests, corporate and government relations, revenue streams… hoping for someone to disrupt this due to better support is like hoping for a country to displace the United States for their superior social systems. It’s nonsensical, that’s not how global mega-corporations work.
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  Sooo you're never going to be able to do what MS did to IBM? You're never going to be able to do what AMD is doing to Intel?
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Well... being lucky enough to negotiate a fairly liberal licensing agreement with a tech juggernaut as MS did with IBM for something as critical as the OS? Not likely. AMD has been making chips literally for decades with investments in Billions. They had to spin their fab business off it was too expensive to keep up with. And even now, it's taken nearly a decade of competitive and leading products to make inroads, and even then they're still under 50% of x86 computers in use. Linux has been around over 30 years, and is just now cracking 5% desktop market share. This happens while Windows has become less than 10% of Microsoft revenue, with well over a decade of "free" upgrades. So, yeah, if you're able to get a company started... get billions invested... able to create compelling products without triggering literal mine-fields of IP and legislative restrictions... sure, you might be able to unseat a competitive mega corporation. But unlikely in anything resembling a lifetime measured in less than decades.
    - MichaelZuo 1y ago
      If it was easy enough to be even remotely feasible for average HN users then Microsoft would already be long gone. Because there are likely many many people in this world who had that thought before you.

zer00eyz 1y ago

> We need a scale reform for modern businesses - platforms and companies like Microsoft are logistically incapable of providing good service to their customers, or moderating hundreds of millions or even billions of users, effectively separating these companies from all the harm they cause. And here is where "you have to spend X number of days a year doing CS" should be a requirement for every engineer, dev, product manger, and executive. I do not think you understand the level of abject stupidity that customers are capable of. I do not think you understand how likely customers are to do dumb things and blame the company. Companies who provide support charge more for their products to pay for it. How much? Well how many people break things and then ask for refunds. The company pays for those people by marking up all the other products. IN any organization: first friend outside your team should be in accounting. The second should be in customer service. These are the most valuable resources you will have regarding the tempo of what is going on inside your organization. They are the front line and the oracles of "truth" (the books dont lie, unless your Enron' and then you have bigger problems).

tracker1 1y ago
I worked phone support for a while... I had a customer call about backing up their research paper they were working on (iomega, zip drive). After going back and forth for 20m or so, since the drive light wasn't on... Me: "Would you be able to pull the computer out into the light so that you can check the connection with better lighting instead of the flashlight?" Customer: "Not really, the power is out." I worked on the iomega side, second level support, mostly Jazz and OS/2 calls, knew it was going to be a doozy when I got a non-warm zip customer. MCI operated support call center in Chandler, AZ... pretty sure that's where Safelight Auto Glass operates now. Related: A buddy on the Compaq side of the call center got the infamous "broken cup holder" call. He could barely contain the laughter and popped up having to tell anyone at that moment about it.

zdc1 1y ago

The market has solutions to this, but they are mostly for businesses. E.g. You can purchase "support" either from Microsoft, or other third parties that will then deal with MS for you if they can't fix it themselves. And whatever software you buy also has it's own support terms too. (I've had good experiences with paid AWS support under both models.) On the flip side: if you're an individual, you're at a poker table with a $50 chip—you don't have leverage—you either just take the bet or don't. So you're basically forced to research the laptop/hardware/software you intend to run to verify it's a happy path, or it at least has vendors (or a local PC store) that will help you if something breaks, and hope for the best. So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support? Would people even pay for an OS anymore?

jjani 1y ago
> So I guess the question is, would people be willing to pay for good support? They're already doing so, just not receiving it. Microsoft made a yearly profit of 101 billion dollars, or better phrased, 101,000 million dollars. The solution isn't "the consumer pays more", it's "investors earn less".
- eviks 1y ago
  How much of that was from the products discussed in these Q&As?

apparent 1y ago

I wonder if they will purposely train/instruct chatbot help agents to be a bit less helpful, to mimic the friction and frustration that phone trees and such create. Or perhaps they'll train them to be cheerfully helpful, but to just dump all the feedback in a virtual circular file. If so, would the chatbot admit this is what happens if the user asked them?

burnt-resistor 1y ago

> The point isn't to resolve user problems, it's to reduce the number of people taking up the time of support agents. Letting people vent in a pseudo-official channel accomplishes that. Whenever something gets resolved that was being fixed anyway, because the "industry partners", enterprise and high level customers wanted it, they can mark an issue as resolved, and generate the appearance of responsive service. Yep. It's like Whitehouse "petitions". Time-wasting tarpits for the unaware. > It's like standing up complex automated phone menus, you're going to frustrate a certain number of callers into giving up, and reduce the overall number of customers you have to interact with. The point of pointless troubleshooting procedures, long forms, long wait times, denials, and inconvenience is to monetize misery and create a maximally-negative conversion funnel. Ask any UnitedHealth or airline CEO.