Hacker News Reader

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.

Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.

View on HN

And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.

The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software.

And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc.

In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.

That’s still the case today, even though the base charge is now $500/incident. I always get a refund.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com