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I had the same reaction to this when I was told by Microsoft, however this description seems intentionally misleading. Microsoft Support accepts calls for support and bug reports. There's a fee for the support. If it turns out that the issue is a defect, then you won't pay for the support call.

Unfortunately, this was the only way to report a bug at the time.

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Yeah thats definitely possible, I may be misremembering the specifics. I think for us the end result was the same: it made us a lot less likely to help them improve their product.

We did the opposite. With premier support, you used to buy a bucket of hours. We had a few folks that learned the lingo and basically was able to attach a product defect to almost any call we made, billable to the product group.

We’d end up with a surplus of hours, and leverage the threat of slashing those hours to get the execs on the support side to push for concessions from the other parts of the business. Premier was basically a revenue generator for us :)

Something tells me they don't mind if the bucket's overflowing so long as you're paying for the water. "Make 'em feel like _they're_ workin' _you_" is a tried-and-true sales tactic

But sadly not enough to break their desktop monopoly.

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