[spauldo]

I suspect it depends on the industry and type of product.

In the PLC market, I've worked with Schneider-Electric, Wago, and Emerson support. All three were excellent. They're excellent because they know we're going to choose which vendor to use for our next project based on our experience with the current project.

For protocol bridges, I've dealt with Digi and Real Time Automation. Digi's support was halfhearted at best. RTA spent hours talking on the phone and even dug through a closet to find documentation for an ancient version of one of their products in order to help me figure out how to interface with it. Guess who we used for the next project?

Price is important but my time is expensive. Good support for a more expensive product wins over poor support for a cheap one.

But all this only works because of the nature of our industry. For consumer goods, good support will lose to price nearly every time.