🚀 go-pugleaf

steve@up.edu (Steve Ward) writes:

>>Univel Postings
>>    LET YOUR PEOPLE GO!  Let them answer questions on the net and participate
>>    in the newsgroups! If you think you'd loose face by letting post on the
>>    net then I would recommend that you look in the mirror.  You could scrawl
>>    the source for an entire OS on that blank and barren kisser. 

>If they do this all of us have to behave ourselves and not deluge them with
>direct email and questions.  Perhaps a "posting only" policy of sorts, to
>eliminate answering the same questions over and over.

Someone at Novell could easily prepare a FAQ, and everytime a question
posed on the net gets answered, it gets added to the FAQ and the FAQ gets
posted.  They could even post the FAQ fom a psuedo account to prevent email
addresses from getting out, if thats important to them.

This could even be a full-time position (funded by marketing).

As an experienced netter, I know that one can expect a certain amount of
mail from customers if you post regularly.  The amount of mail is in
direct proportion to the quality of your products and documentation,
how well the products meet user needs, as well as the accessability and
knowledgability of your tech support.

"Lots of mail" generally means that one or more of the above is less
than adequate.  "Lots of mail" is a problem that should not be ignored.
It is an indication that something could be done better.  When things
work, "lots of mail" becomes "lots less mail" becomes "lots of thanks".

Every developer relishes "lots of thanks".

There is only one gotcha to all this, and thats the "internet loud mouth".
Every group gets one or more of these guys.  Everybody (except the loud
mouth himself) knows how to detect one of these types.  Luckily, none
of these fellows has found a roost in biz.univel.misc, yet.  The best fix
for these types is to send them a free CD-ROM of Linux, because there is
just no pleasing them unless your product costs $59.95, comes with every
piece of public domain software ever written, whose entire set of users
is also a subset of the set of people who have internet connections, and
whose entire set of users is also the entire tech support department.  Write
off the $59.95 as cheap compared to the support costs to keep this person
as your customer.  Better yet, send them a copy of NT :-).

-Rick
--
Rick Richardson		Senior Staff Engineer	Writing X Widgets?
DigiBoard, Inc.		Email: rick@digibd.com	Get Bert Bos's 'wbuild 2.0'
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