RE: Post current product user docs to company website?

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Julie Stickler said:
> On Dec 13, 2007 3:07 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin
> <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:
> > In most industries, competitors just PURCHASE samples of the other
> > fellow's product, which comes not only with docs, but with SUPPORT!
:-)
> 
> That is quite possibly true.  Probably depends on the industry and
> product.  I've worked for software companies, and I suspect that
> whether or not the competition buys your product depends on the cost
> of a license. Both of the software companies I have worked for have
> sold enterprise level software which cost thousands of dollars.
> Support is a separate cost, because annual support agreements are
> their bread and butter.
> 
> I wish it was true that all software came with support.  I recently
> purchased Flare, and a year of support cost the same amount as the
> software!  I took a look at their excellent documentation and decided
> I could probably afford to skip the support agreement.  (Thank all the
> gods for their excellent user forum which have been a huge help with
> the very few problems I've encountered so far.)

My employer does sell some software-only products, but mostly it's
hardware with a software component. Within my division, many of the
appliance products are not cheap, being priced in the tens of thousands
of dollars for a typical installation.
I'm sure that SAP and Business Objects and the others have all purchased
each others' horrifically expensive enterprise software, to keep up on
what the competition is doing.
On that other question:
As my manager (whom I've never met :-) ) said, her reason for buying the
Flare support was to get the "free" updates. Our real support comes from
the Flare user forums, just like everybody else's.
Reminds me of SUSE Linux, which I've used for years; the included
"support" went no farther than getting it successfully installed.
Anything else (which means pretty much 99.9% of questions) was handled
by other users in the very active mailing list. Novel finally
acknowledged that state of affairs by placing SUSE fully into the open
community as OpenSUSE. Community support has only grown since then.
Of course, the Flare forums, like the OpenSUSE forums have participation
by some of the developers and other insiders, which is a positive and
welcome thing to see.

Kevin

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