🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1dj8itINN6ru@matt.ksu.ksu.edu> danodom@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Dan Odom) writes:
>I've found another corporation that behaves this way: Borland.
>If you send mail to customer-support@borland.com, they send you
>a message saying that they don't offer support on the Internet and
>you'll have to ask them on Compu$erve.  What a rip!

It's just inefficient for them to offer tech support by email.  If you ask 
your question in an open forum (like Compuserve or Usenet), then lots of 
other people will see your question and their answer.  

I suspect they'd be quite happy to have a tech support forum on Usenet, if 
it could be demonstrated that

 a) There'd be no objections to "commercial" use.
 b) There's the right kind of audience here to justify it.

I don't think a) is a problem, because there are several other companies 
providing tech support this way.  I think b) is the big problem:  the Usenet 
audience is strongly biased towards Unix users, and Borland doesn't do Unix;
it's strongly biased towards academic users, and Borland doesn't make money 
from them; and it's smaller than the Compuserve audience.

For example, the traffic on BPROGA, the Compuserve forum dealing with Turbo 
Pascal, is at least 10 or 20 times heavier than the traffic on 
comp.lang.pascal, the closest Usenet equivalent.  (Comp.lang.pascal also has 
discussion of other Pascals, but TP dominates the traffic there, so it's not 
a bad comparison.)

Compuserve isn't that expensive; if you live in a big city so that it's a 
local call, and you use a session automator, you can get a lot of 
information for $5/month.  If you can't afford to spend $5/month, then the 
sad truth is that Borland probably isn't interested in helping you.  
They aren't helping you out of some noble feeling that since they sold you 
something they should support it; they help you because they hope to sell 
you something else.

Duncan Murdoch
dmurdoch@mast.queensu.ca