[b112]

It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too.

But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.

Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.

On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.

I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.

Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.

[nradov]

High end enterprise products still come with support. That's literally what customers are paying for: a single throat to choke.

[Bratmon]

Exactly! The "pay a lot of money but get really good support" tier still exists just about everywhere. You just didn't do the first part.

[atherton94027]

It really depends, support is usually the first thing companies adjust when they want to improve their margins.

Even when you're paying millions to AWS you have to get through their first line of support and they will ask silly questions until you can convince them to escalate.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

So build barely usable products that force people to pay for support as an upsell.

[dTal]

Aka the Red Hat business model. It's all you have when access to the product itself is free. Gotta keep yourself in the loop somehow.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

‘Oh you want to access help documents indexed by google? Please show us your enterprise licence to continue.’

[eviks]

Not really, you get "really dedicated support" at most, but not a "really good" one, otherwise all those decades-old bugs common in many software producs would've been fixed since they affect people at all tiers

[glitchc]

Back then, computers didn't had competition from the analog world, so vendors had to provide excellent service such that users would be convinced into switching over to the digital way if doing things. Now comouters have a monopoly on how we work and live, so vendors care as little as possible.