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Comment by bernardv | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. I was an MS Windows Tech Support during the Win31/1 to Win95 transition. Looking back, it went pretty smoothly. Most of our calls were HW driver related or usability related if I remember well.

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I'll share my own story of the Windows 3.1 -> 95 migration and MS Tech support. At the time, I was using my grandfather's old PC that had originally been a 486sx 33mhz processor with 4mb of RAM and a 200mb HDD. We upgraded the machine using an Intel "Overdrive" processor to a 486dx/2 66mhz processor with 8mb of RAM and added a Soundblaster 16 sound card and triple-speed CD ROM drive. I received a copy of Windows 95 for Christmas 1995 and proceeded to install it on the system. It worked pretty well and, a few months later, I decided I wanted to add the "MS Plus!" pack.

I was 14 years old and knew very little about PCs at the time; though, I was learning. What I definitely didn't know at the time was that the HDD in the machine that I was told was nearly 500MB was actually a 200mb drive that had been compressed with an older version of DriveSpace. The addition of Plus! upgraded the compression to DriveSpace 3 which corrupted something on the drive that caused the system to hardlock as soon as the Windows 95 UI appeared no matter what I did.

After spending 4-5 hours on the phone with a very patient tech support specialist at MS, he eventually concluded that I would need to format the drive as nothing we did in those hours worked at all. Definitely a major learning experience for me doing my first full system format and OS reinstall.

By the end of 1996, I'd be doing my first Linux installation on a slightly newer PC that I saved money from a summer job to buy. If it hadn't been for DriveSpace 3 and an MS tech support specialist who educated the hell out of me for a few hours, who knows when (or even if) I would have gone down the rabbit hole that led to my career.

That is pretty wild, imagine that support in the current climate

Exactly. We are moving to a tine where having a person individually and attentively help you with anything is a high order luxury item.

A major change is on the horizon though. We are close to where a large language model could play the role of the support side of that call. But if it an AI on the support side, would anyone bother to learn on the customer side?

Can they just add that to Cortana and have it format itself and reinstall Windows for you?

The large language model would still need training data, which necessitates those high-quality support calls still be recorded for training data.

This lead me to wonder if retail Windows licenses are expensive because they used to include a phone support and then, when people learned how to Google for problems, Microsoft dropped the phone support but kept the price because "customers are used to this price tag"?

I recently bought a Windows 11 machine that came with Windows 11 Home, I felt the need for some Pro features and went to check the price for an upgrade and my jaw dropped. Years of "free upgrade to Windows 10/11" lead me believe those licences were less pricey nowadays.

$199.99 if I'm not mistaken.

It was something like that; I remember my friend’s mom arguing for a hour to get the mouse for free (it was advertised as such or something on any new PC and the sales guy wanted to say it didn’t apply) and they forgot to charge for windows 95.

Of course soon is was bundled with any prebuilt but back at release those were relatively rare and expensive.

They have basically done the same thing with software assurance support recently. A few years ago when we had a SQL issue in pre-deployment testing we opened a ticket and spoke to an engineer who knew what they were doing. Last year when we did that we had a 1x/day email back and forth with an out-of-country third party contractor who ultimately was unable to help us in any way. We ended up figuring it out ourselves (that Visual Studio version somehow conflicted with that SQL version such that data errors would get introduced (WTF!?)) while said support contractor was still trying to get in touch with real actual SQL engineers for us.

>Microsoft dropped the phone support but kept the price

If you do the inflation adjustment from Win 95, you'd see that a modern Windows license is far cheaper today than it was back then.

At the same time, it’s probably worth remembering the contemporary Microsoft rule of thumb that “each product-support call costs a sale”[1], that is to say, handling a single product-support call to that standard costs as much as was earned by selling the product in the first place (and the products weren’t exactly cheap—not that they’ve become cheap now).

[1] “Old New Thing” (the print one), https://books.google.com/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC&lpg=PA1&pg=PT...

But if the IT guy tells his boss that ‘95 don’t work with shit because sim city didn’t run for him at home, it could cost a lot more sales from a company that chooses not to upgrade.

Google and the new wave of firewalled engineering orgs are so long-run stupid that it boggles the mind.

A legacy proper, functioning support org's job is to sift through user-is-the-problem bugs to identify the smaller list of actual bugs... which engineering then fixes. Because they're actual bugs!

Nowadays, folks look at Support and QA as cost centers, to be funded and staffed at minimum levels.

Small wonder SRE have become the new rock stars -- companies disempowered anyone else able to call a bug a bug.

It's difficult to explain to people today just how good Microsoft tech support was in the early-mid 1990s. We had a similarly complex issue with DOS 6.something that I don't remember the full details of, and I think I learned more about operating systems in the couple hours we were on the phone with MS than I did in the semester-long operating systems class I took in college. Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix that helped with whatever the situation was we had encountered. Just night and day compared to most modern interactions with tech companies.

> Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix

That is just so utterly inconceivable today that I didn't believe it at first. Not just being physical media, but receiving that level of attention and care.

The best you can hope for these days is a vague forum reply with some shockingly bad information from an "official Microsoft rep" who is at least 5 degrees of separation from anyone who has seen code before. Disgraceful.

I was on official Microsoft support forums for Xbox cloud this fall. Many of us had similar breaking issues that did not appear to be a pebkac. I provided reasonably detailed description, what I tried, what I discounted, my full hardware software and network setup, testing results on different machines etc. But couple of other users provided hours of their own network traces and wiresharks and extremely detailed investigation. Basically handed a full replication and analysis to them for something that affected a significant number of people. Continued copy and past response from "support" was basically to send us to reddit or stack or some other even more social support.

I worked for a summer at a managed service provider that was a certified partner of Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The level of service you get as a (technical) business partner is unbelievable compared to what you get as a consumer. Cisco TAC made a custom firmware patch for me once.

This is something you only see from indie FOSS developers nowadays. I used to do this, and my users were always delighted. They usually became pretty loyal to the project, and the quality of bug reports they submit got exponentially better as a result.

It's a great strategy all around if you take an hour to care about another person.

The most rewarding calls were those helping either very young or very old customers who just needed help getting started. I recall a grandfather calling in with his grandson, trying to figure out the new Windows machine he had just bought him. Being patient and understanding was all it took to make a difference.

That must have been a wild time, between brand new interfaces and a changing hardware landscape. Did you have many BSOD calls, or was that what you meant with HW driver related?

Plenty of BSOD calls for sure. Also some very memorable calls from a bunch of Linux guys who would think-up of a monster Windows machine loaded with all sorts of crazy hardware peripherals and call support to mess with us.

Are you sure it was truly just to mess with you? If I were a Linux kernel maintainer back then, and there was some hardware I wanted to fix support for but didn't personally have the money to buy, I think "trick Microsoft into divulging how their own driver for it works" would be what I'd see as a "clever hack"!

Perhaps. But I think some of them were actually more senior techs calling in and messing with the new guy.

About as wild as any given day in Node.js land

Same here, though not for MS, just ISPs and resellers. Most often, iirc, it was drivers on floppies and “how do I do …”

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