Lessons learned - cont'd

See the first part of this series here.

Can’t include free support

Support cannot be included.  You can't afford it for a product like this.  It is too big.  Teaching ADO.Net, data binding, database design, etc is too much. 

On average I spent almost $1000 per user in tech support during year two.  That meant they were paying $250-500 per developer and we were losing money big time. 

Free tech support is an open invitation to every compiler error message "The error message says you are missing a file, did you check if the file exists?".  I had mistakenly thought that it would drop over time as documentation came up (2300 pages of help exist), and as the forums picked up.  It never dropped.  People who are solo coders want someone else to bounce ideas off, play out designs, etc.  They end up hitting whatever vendors they can get free support from in order to have that sounding board.  That is all consulting, not tech support.  Big mistake on my part.

Users often send us huge complicated TSQL statements “This doesn’t work”.  What doesn’t?  Bad results, bad data, doesn’t even compile?  Usually it comes down to the fact that they don’t understand what it does either “A third party tool built that T-SQL statement, so that is what I have to run”.  This lack of SQL knowledge hurts because we spent so very much time trying to teach people another language (TSQL).

LINQ would be better

I do think that LINQ is a better query language because if you get the language you are working in, then LINQ should be syntax for operating over result sets.  It is not hard to pick up, but it is a mindset change for those who have a good SQL knowledge.  Get over it, you will have to learn it at some point, and then SQL seems sort of quaint (like good old DOS machines).

Outsource it?

The most common answer I got was that US labor was too expensive to do this type of support, outsource to Bulgaria, Russia, India, like the big guys do.  Not my style. 

I am about as patriotic towards my country as you can get (USA).  I would rather have American programmers  and tech support, than outsource.  And to do that people have to be willing to pay a premium.  This is how the Telerik and DevExpress get away with their pricing.  Almost nothing is done in the US except sales and marketing.  Every question I ever got from them was in smaller countries in Eastern Europe. 

Users Fight Support Fees

Users will fight support fees every step of the way.  They will complain about how the docs should explain it to them (they usually do, but the user has not read them or things a help file search means looking on Google for their answer).

ADO.NET is not a niche

I now see what some of my mentors tried to tell me.  ADO.Net is not a niche, it is a technology platform from Microsoft that they just so happen to expose to third parties.  You will have no say in the direction, messaging, etc of your core product (being ADO.Net compatible).  More on this in a later post.