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September 27, 2003
Mozilla Phone Support
MozillaZine reports that Decision One will offer Mozilla phone support on top of its current Netscape service.
I've always been surprised that users would shell out the 40 bucks for support for Netscape, but obviously they are, as they continue to keep that service, meaning its profitable.
Not sure if anyone knows, but paying 40 bucks for a problem includes return calls for up to 24 hours, in case the issue reoccurs or such. So its not a total rip off.
Some poeple suggest that corporate users would use this. Which I very much doubt, they would want a deal that would allow experts to analyze their issues, and if need be, fly over to fix the issue on site. They don't care about bookmarks disappearing and such trivial issues, which is what DesicionOne solves. A enterprise customer rather pays a set fee for unlimited support rather than pay per incident, such as why an applet works in 4.x and not in Gecko. The nightmares I have from those, sigh.
I do see some potential for enterprise support, but DecisionOne it isn't. I wonder if IBM is up for it :) Netscape was able to do this because it had tons of developers who could be asked when the devsupport group was unsure or needed more information. Now with no concentrated expertise, this will be hard.
Reading comments about this reminds me how naive people are. Not everyone using Mozilla knows about the "forums" or "bugzilla". And bugzilla is unusable for a newbie.
Posted by doron at September 27, 2003 11:07 AM
Comments
Surely they'll be developing problem checklists and solution procedures. A truly non-profit and open source endeavor would take this real sample of problems and return the resulting knowledgebase to the community. Only those too lazy to google would have to pay.
Think it'll happen?
Posted by: Andyed at September 27, 2003 11:46 AM
We were planning on doing that at DevEdge - a knowledgebase for common issues. I assume DecisionOne has that internally for themselves.
The foundation should provide this if they are serious about end users.
The Netscape Enterprise Server Help knowledgebase is at http://kb.netscape.com/NASApp/kb/index.jsp for example.
Posted by: Doron at September 27, 2003 12:14 PM
I was thinking that only corporate would pay for support, not that they'd pay DecisionOne for this kind of coverage. A lot of people come to the forums and say "help, i've lost my bookmarks" and if the file still exists, its an easy fix.
Posted by: alanjstr at September 27, 2003 2:33 PM
I hope Decision One is truly useful and know what their doing and not just reading checklists and procedures.
I call Tech Support because I can't solve the problem and have not found one. Would Decision One actually know the difference between a bug, incomplete implementations, etc.? I would rather see Mozilla Foundation partner itself with Protonic.com which is a volunteer-driven free tech support service. You would only get an answer if a volunteer has an answer.
Posted by: Brant Langer Gurganus at September 27, 2003 4:36 PM
Adopt Sheets. I really like the use of Sheets in OS X. The use of Sheets lets me know which window my dialogue belongs to without hijacking my system.
Posted by: Zachary at January 25, 2004 8:31 PM
Drawers. Similar to Sheets, this is a "child" window that gives users access to items that do not always need to be present. But when do you use a drawer and when do you use a palette?
Posted by: Helegor at January 25, 2004 8:32 PM
Drawers. Similar to Sheets, this is a "child" window that gives users access to items that do not always need to be present. But when do you use a drawer and when do you use a palette?
Posted by: Hieronimus at January 25, 2004 8:32 PM
Adhere to Layout Guidelines. Did you leave 12 pixels between your push buttons? Does the positioning of your pop-up menus make sense, and when do you use a pop-up versus a scrolling list? Are you using the right types of buttons for the proper functions?
Posted by: David at January 25, 2004 8:32 PM
For example, if you see an AIM window peeking out from behind your browser and you click on it, that window will come to the front, but the main application window will not. The Mail.app/Activity Viewer is another example. The Aqua system of layers works well in many instances, but not in all. Thank goodness that the Dock is always there to come to the rescue. I know that clicking on an application icon in the Dock will always result in not only the application coming to the front, but also any non-minimized windows associated with it. And if the application is active but no windows are open, clicking on the Dock icon should create a new window in that application.
Posted by: Wymond at January 25, 2004 8:32 PM