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Comment by krimpenrik | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

$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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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