
Be nice. It's a fscking gift - hachiya
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/be-nice-its-a-gift
======
holdenc
It's funny how often software is priced according to the anticipated support
burden, but users feel entitled to support regardless of the price. I once
worked at a financial analytics software company and our end users were non-
technical, but paid about 2K a month for a username and password, and very
often the users were kind and apologetic in their support requests. I also
have a personal software product that costs $5/mo with a free trial, and many
people trialing it are quite impatient and high maintenance. My take-away: if
you are setting yourself up for an end-user support role, make sure it's
priced accordingly.

~~~
jwdunne
It's a bit of a long leap but I've noticed that the clients we do discounts to
always end up being really high maintenance, some even destroying their
websites. On the flip side, the clients spending big money are always great to
work with and generally let us do our thing. They always require less support.

There must be a deeper basis behind this. Some kind of psychology behind
pricing. I've noticed it everywhere I turn.

One particulary interesting case was the packaging on Tesco (large supermarket
chain the UK) branded toilet paper. It said it was just as strong and soft as
Andrex, the leading brand. Andrex is much more expensive but still remains the
leading brand!

I've actually been toying with this thought for a while and now it warrants
much further investigation.

~~~
happyfeet
Good point. My thought is that, the $5 budget apps are actually paid for by
the person using it whereas the big budget items (say $2000 software) are paid
for (or negotiated) by the indirect purchasing departments. The end users
don't actually pay it themselves which could also be part of the psychology as
to why they aren't so 'demanding' so to say.

~~~
tintin
True, but there is another thing. With big deals you normally define support
very clear in the contract. With smaller deals companies don't feel the urge
to do this.

But it's very simple to say: "This product is cheap because it lacks quick
response times for support". Most customers won't have a problem with that.

------
noonespecial
Back when I worked at a small retail computer store, I never ceased to be
amazed by silly old men (and they were almost complete carbon copies of each
other) who would drive an F250 pickup for an hour to save $5 on a mouse (our
loss leader) and then do it _again_ to come back and complain.

My favorite incident was when my boss offered the guy a cash refund. That
wasn't good enough. My boss offered him the refund, _and let him keep the
mouse for free_ just to get him out of the store. He smiled, finally
satisfied, _and then asked to buy another one_.

~~~
khafra
I hope your boss said "no."

~~~
noonespecial
It gets funnier. The loss leader was one per customer. The guy actually argued
that because he had gotten the refund and was given the original for free, it
didn't count as a sale and he was still entitled to buy the "one per
customer".

We had to pick up the phone and start "calling the police" to get him out of
the store. He lectured us on how there was no way we could stay in business by
refusing to accept people's money.

There are some days I wonder if all humans are sentient.

------
jodrellblank
If a person appears, offering me a solution to get me to my destination, leads
me down their ally, taking my time and attention and meaning I lose the
opportunity to check other solutions, and at the end of the ally I fall into a
muddy riverbank and see a sign saying 'TODO: build bridge', we wouldn't call
_that_ a gift, we'd call it deceitful and cruel (or worse).

You don't owe me your work, but I don't owe you gratitude for it either. It's
not a gift, it's not even that transactional. (Although that's no excuse for
being nasty or threatening!)

~~~
exDM69
With an open source project, it's unlikely that a person will appear and offer
you anything and lead you down any alley. If you're trying to cross a river
and come by a raft and start whining about the lack of a bridge, let alone
saying that someone wasted your time, you're ungrateful.

"TODO: build bridge" means that the author thought that it's a good idea to
build a bridge, however the author has other priorities and has postponed the
bridge building to the time that it's actually needed (perhaps by someone
else). Now you stumble by in need of a bridge, what should you do? Build the
damn bridge, of course.

You're not owing any gratitude to anyone, but badmouthing someone for not
doing exactly what you want is plain bad behavior.

~~~
jodrellblank
There's a difference between finding a raft (here's some source on github
which takes a few minutes to look at) and being enticed by a bridge (here's a
homepage showing up in search results, presenting a packaged solution as an
answer to the problem I'm having, which doesn't turn out to be a problem until
hours or days of integration work).

------
tyler_ball
'Gift' is a word I wish I saw more often in the vicinity of 'open source'. I
love open source software. I love that there can be a community around any
project, no matter how small. It's a powerful philosophy.

But I wish more people would understand the differences between 'free' and
'open source'. Open source software is not free. Huge companies invest
millions of dollars into open source projects that you probably use. Time is
money.

Looking at is as a gift not only makes you understand the generosity with
which the author(s) has open sourced their code, but when I think about it
like that I see that there are real people behind the code and that they
should be treated as such.

A good lesson.

------
exDM69
I am always disappointed when I see people complain (with a negative tone)
about a library, whether it's missing documentation or an unstable API or
whatever, without contacting the author of the library and asking how's the
project doing or would the author need some help. Sometimes the author is
burdened by other projects or paying work but would probably appreciate any
contact from fellow developers or potential users to discuss/plan ahead the
project. A little positive feedback or a few pull requests from strangers
makes good things happen.

in short: It's open source. You're a coder. Fix it.

------
jtchang
Honestly I'd like to see the e-mails that were sent if only for personal
amusement.

I have so much respect for those that work on open source projects. If you
think about it there isn't much on the web today that isn't in some way
touched by some open source code.

------
SoftwareMaven
I have to admit, by the end, the OP's responses were classier than mine would
have been. Kudos to you.

I'll never understand the sense of entitlement that says you must drop
everything you are doing and pay attention to me and only me.

------
zrgiu_
I've been once on the other side of the "be nice, it's a f####ng gift"
situation.

I had a subscription at a local telecom company, which provided both telephony
and broadband internet. I went and cancelled the subscription in July 2010,
and almost a year later, in June 2011 I get called by a repo company asking
for $20. After a few calls, I find out that the telecom company issued one
more bill, 3 months after I cancelled. Apparently, they gave me for free when
I cancelled another 3 free months of phone subscription, which automatically
extended the broadband internet connection. Arguing with them over the phone
(I had left the country by then) I got this exact reply: "It's a f####ng gift,
be nice! What's your problem?"

The way this works in my country (Romania), if you don't pay up, you either
have to sue them to prove you don't have to pay, or you get reported to the
credit bureau so you won't get any loans from any bank for the next few years.
Sadly, I ended up paying ...

~~~
rmc
Disgraceful, and I'm sure illegal. Now that Romania is in the EU, you should
see how much of the EU Customer rights laws have been implemented into your
national law. Since Romania joined the EU recently, most of these laws are
probably new, and hence companies probably not be aware of them.

(Probably no help to you now in this case, but for future reference)

------
wlievens
One time, on my (free) browser game, we banned a user for gross misbehaviour.
A few mails went back and forth between him and me, ending up with him
threatening to "sue us into the ground", and his dad was "a lawyer" so he was
sure he'd win. I replied something along the lines of "sure, whatever" and
never heard back.

------
tikhonj
I suspect you'd also have this sort of thing with a paid product. The only
difference is that you'd have to go out of your way to placate the person, as
he would be a customer.

~~~
snprbob86
Sometimes it is OK to fire a customer.

------
Joakal
In a way, it does make sense. In web design and developer communities; there's
a saying that if you give an inch, they want a mile. They are not good clients
to work with.

While it's very appreciated what those guys did, they should've ignored the
aggressive support request.

I value such free support and very thankful even if it was a ruthless "Go
check maxmemory" response to "How does Redis handle bigger data than memory
assigned?". Thank them for the response, even if it wasn't the solution. It's
appreciated.

------
cturner
I admire the respectful way that he handles communication with the difciult
party, and becomes helpful on another level. I'd like to be better at dealing
with the world like that.

------
wedesoft
There's a nice collection of the kind of demands customers come up with:
<http://clientsfromhell.net/>

~~~
tingletech
This site is also pretty good and in the same vein
<http://notalwaysright.com/>

------
wazoox
This doesn't even apply only to software, generally. My company sell specially
tailored storage servers, and we almost gave up on cheaper systems ( < 2000
euros) because they concentrate most of the support problems, questions and
rants.

In fact, we have one customer buying us cheap systems (1500 euros) by the
hundreds. We have very, very little problems with them. We have another
customer with a whole bunch of big systems and a couple of small ones for
tests, etc. No problem either.

So it confirms that it's not so much the cheap system _per se_ than the cheap
customer which comes with problems.

------
T-hawk
I wonder how much of the anecdata being relayed here is a result of selective
perception? We don't really remember the cases where a freeloading customer
went away at the first "no", or where a well-paying customer received the red
carpet service treatment. The high-maintenance cheapskates stick out in mind
because they're the exceptions, but perhaps they're not quite so common as
they might seem.

------
PaddyCorry
Nice article, thanks.

My first job out of college was in a support centre, supporting voice
recognition software: an early ancestor of Siri if you like! One weekend
without our knowledge, the parent company stuck a prior version of the
software onto a free bundle cd that came with a PC magazine in the UK... a
great marketing move sure, but the amount of calls we got as a result of that
free software was incredible. People can get irate when voice recognition
software doesn't work as well as they expect (for a variety of reasons,
generally either hardware or accent related!), but with this free version,
people really lost the run of themselves altogether... some of the calls we
took that week were from some very angry people indeed!

The writer of this article summed up this confusing paradox quite well by
offering a refund... for this free item... which was a gift!

------
niccl
This is really interesting in the context of the whingeing about Ubuntu 11.10
and Unity. One part of me absolutely agrees with the OP, but another part of
me thinks that in a specific case like Ubuntu 11.10, Canonical, with their
Ubuntu gift, do have a responsibility to their installed base. Is there some
line related to project size (or something else) that means users _do_ have a
legitimate expectation of adequate support?

