🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov11.221754.16254@alphalpha.com> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
>I've found very few "end-user" apps that had bugs I couldn't work around.

Sure, you *can* work around most bugs.  Does that mean that you should be
*forced* to?  Why should vendors have so much control over their users?
Who should be in control here, us or them?

What if your bicycle dealer didn't allow you to perform your own
adjustments and repairs (I'm not going to repeat the car analogy, which you
shot down pretty well)?

>If there were people who fixed software for a few hundred dollars this
>would be fine.  There are not.  I don't know what the standard rate is
>out there for software consulting, but I've never charged less than $60/hour
>and it usually takes me considerably more than two hours to fix non-trivial
>bugs.  

Well, I've always thought consulting rates are exhorbitant.  Part of the
problem is the cut that the consulting agency takes.  And there's the
overhead costs (medical insurance, FICA) that have to be paid out of fees.
However, I also believe that consultants need to make up for the fact that
they often have lean periods between jobs.  In the end they're presumably
making the same ~$40K/year that I am with a full-time job.

However, if there were more software that consultants could fix, then there
would be more work for consultants, and they'd have less unemployed time;
then they wouldn't need to charge so much per hour.

>This works only because the cost of fixing is usually much less than
>the cost of the car.  If my Mac software cost as much as a car then
>I wouldn't have a Mac.  If it cost as much to upgrade as it does to
>fix my care I wouldn't have any upgrades.  A typical Mac software
>upgrade costs somewhere between $0 and $50.  I don't know how you
>can run a support organization on that kind of money.

Well, we have over 200 Macs, so an upgrade could cost us as much as $10K.
It would be much more cost-effective for us to pay someone for a few hours
work.  And it would be even more cost-effective for us to let one of our
systems programmers fix it.
-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar