Re: support
> How much of this is not support then?
It's all support.
> Thinking as an IT customer why do I need support
You don't *need* support. You could decide to use community knowledge on the web and do it yourself - just like you intimated you would with Windows.
But as a commercial entity, that might not make any sense. You might decide it is cheaper and less risky to buy support from a specialist vendor than to try to cover everything in-house.
> (unless I am stupid to throw my money away).
See, it's comments like that that convince me you've never seen a commercial environment.
Users want support. That might be in-house, or it might be bought in. But leaving a bunch of users alone to support themselves is a recipe for disaster except in an environment where all users are sufficiently skilled to be support people if they so chose[1].
So support is a fact of life, whatever OS you're on. I have *far* more Windows support customers than I do Linux support customers, despite the fact that I am targeting the latter.
> Maybe because I don't feel very confident with the software, or there isn't enough
> documentation, either directly from the company or from web forums or I am charitable!.
No. It's because management want to make sure that, should anything tricky come along, the entire company won't be stuck twiddling its thumbs while someone investigates the problem.
A huge number of support contracts are never actually used...
> I would never get support if I know I can fix it myself in the unlikely case something is wrong.
Good for you. But you won't be managing any significant IT resources in the near future. When hundreds of engineers require the IT to work so that they can do anything, every hour of downtime costs you a *lot* of money. Having to trawl through the link-farms on Google to find an obscure fix to a gnarly problem is not a cost-effective way of providing that support function. So you either train up your in-house support staff to be experts in every package they have to see, or you train them to be good enough to deal with the bulk of the workload, and you have a specialist support company on contract to pick up the phone. Guess which of these makes commercial sense once the application count starts to rise...
You'll notice that the above argument doesn't discriminate between OSes, and doesn't mention the quality of the code or its documentation; it's a simple business case that says you mitigate risk by buying support.
> Any explanations why a company would need support if they are looking after their money?
Plenty. You'll see it in action once you start seeing IT in industry.
Vic.
[1] Even then, it will often go horribly wrong because you get competing policies.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
