>However, there is ample money to be made in customer service and support... >Why cant people understand that and create a sustainable model around it.. >maybe offsite call support...
The reason no one has created such a model is because it does not exist. It is a chimera. You can chase it all you like but you'll never catch it. LinuxCare, RedHat, VA, e-grail, Zend.... The list goes on and on. You cannot make money, real money that you can plan a business on by providing service UNLESS you create a consulting arm that does the implementation like Oracle or IBM. You buy their systems and pay x$ for the software and 4x$ for the service contract and you cannot get the one without the other. We could do that. Sell CF server for $50 and then force you to buy a service contract for $1450+ at the same time. Support is fantastically expensive. The cost for us to field a single call is over $50 per incident when there is no research or call back. When there is, it is a lot more. Anyway with these forums and lists and books and all the resources, how many people would use our support anyway when they can get it here free or in a book for the most part? Your point about upgrades also assumes that there are no new projects, only existing sites. What we find is that existing apps remain on servers with the version on which they are developed but new projects are almost always built on the latest server available. It is not a case of deep pockets or geeks upgrading, our upgrade base is much wider than that. Can it grow infinitely? Yes. As long as there are new apps being built, it can. Right now there is a lull and that effects us, but if we were only providing support, that lull would be the same or worse. We have been competing with free solutions for as long as CF has been a product or nearly so. We always will. CFML has a lot of advantages over script based languages and that advantage has not gone away. We recognize that ASP and PHP are popular and their growth needs to serve as a spur for us to develop as well, but we have known that and been faced with that since the beginning. If free were all that was important, then there would ONLY be PHP and ASP sites and that is clearly not the case. _________________________________________________________ Matt Brown Community Manager Macromedia (650) 481-4525 [EMAIL PROTECTED] FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/cf-talk@houseoffusion.com/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
