[cydonian_monk]

It's difficult to explain to people today just how good Microsoft tech support was in the early-mid 1990s. We had a similarly complex issue with DOS 6.something that I don't remember the full details of, and I think I learned more about operating systems in the couple hours we were on the phone with MS than I did in the semester-long operating systems class I took in college. Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix that helped with whatever the situation was we had encountered. Just night and day compared to most modern interactions with tech companies.

[rolenthedeep]

> Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix

That is just so utterly inconceivable today that I didn't believe it at first. Not just being physical media, but receiving that level of attention and care.

The best you can hope for these days is a vague forum reply with some shockingly bad information from an "official Microsoft rep" who is at least 5 degrees of separation from anyone who has seen code before. Disgraceful.

[NikolaNovak]

I was on official Microsoft support forums for Xbox cloud this fall. Many of us had similar breaking issues that did not appear to be a pebkac. I provided reasonably detailed description, what I tried, what I discounted, my full hardware software and network setup, testing results on different machines etc. But couple of other users provided hours of their own network traces and wiresharks and extremely detailed investigation. Basically handed a full replication and analysis to them for something that affected a significant number of people. Continued copy and past response from "support" was basically to send us to reddit or stack or some other even more social support.

[closeparen]

I worked for a summer at a managed service provider that was a certified partner of Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The level of service you get as a (technical) business partner is unbelievable compared to what you get as a consumer. Cisco TAC made a custom firmware patch for me once.

[rolenthedeep]

This is something you only see from indie FOSS developers nowadays. I used to do this, and my users were always delighted. They usually became pretty loyal to the project, and the quality of bug reports they submit got exponentially better as a result.

It's a great strategy all around if you take an hour to care about another person.