RE: WWP and support

["Peter Ring" <pri@xxxxxx>]

As I see it (comparison of business models aside), in a 
high tech business like this, the real issues are:

- Your customers pay for a solution, something that will 
  add value to their business. You are part of a value 
  chain. Whether you provide that value through adequate 
  design of the software, through training, through 
  hand-helding, or any combination of that, well, the 
  optimal solution depends of course on circumstances. 

- Manuals, training, and support are parts of the 
  product. Poor manuals and high support costs usually 
  indicate fundamental design problems caused by a 
  flawed product development process. Most tech writers 
  are able (and eager!) to elaborate on this. Anyway, 
  the market communication that takes place before and 
  during product development will add a lot more value 
  to the product than the same effort spent after release 
  of the product. If your development process neglects 
  feedback from customers, someone else will find a 
  business opportunity ...

- Your customers want a lasting relationship, and you
  want a lasting relationship. How much can you spend 
  to keep a customer? What is the cost of getting a new 
  customer? What is the cost (in terms of bad-will) of 
  getting a dissatisfied customer? For the customer, 
  what is the cost of switching to an alternative 
  solution? If you often put your customer in a situation 
  similar to that of switching to another supplier, your 
  customer might as well do just that.

While this topic might be regarded somewhat off-list, 
it is only because it touches some fundamental issues in 
our industry.

A case story: For some years, Folio has been owned by 
Open Market. Folio is (was) the company that supplies the 
publishing technology that we (and many other legal 
publishers) use for cd-rom and web. Open Market is very 
successful in e-commerce, but didn't understand the needs 
of professionel publishers very well. Support was 'an issue', 
but even worse, we got the experience that Folio didn't 
really care much about our needs. Just recently, Folio 
was re-acquired by its original founders; the company name 
is now NextPage. This event was accompanied by the Executive 
Vice President, Henry Heilesen, traveling around the world 
and talking directly with customer companies (as well as with 
our corporate offices and his own distributors). We got a lot 
more impressed by Henry talking with us about our needs 
than by Open Market executives talking to each other about 
company policies. 

I'm happy to see Mark Hilton report that "The FrameMaker 
product marketing team just completed personal interviews 
of almost 100 companies worldwide ...". And, while I won't 
be able to come to Seybold, I sure look forward to see 
reports from list members.


BTW, how come that so many companies in electronic publishing 
are Utah based?


Kind regards

Peter Ring

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