Support is the new black

Seems like everyone’s keeping themselves afloat by offering support for otherwise free products these days. At first, this struck me as odd and not viable in the long term — make a product, give it away for free, but make money offering technical support. But then I realized that this isn’t really that much different than selling computers. From what I understand, it isn’t the computer or the bundled software that makes money at big box stores, it’s the $30 cables.

Of course, as someone who’s much more likely to give than need support, I’m a total free-rider with a mile-wide smile.

I don’t think about business very much, but support has to be fairly profitable. It’s ongoing — even well-built products need tweaking now and again, even if they’re working fine. And the race-to-the-bottom effect probably isn’t as substantial. For example, you can replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org at your company and say “it’s good enough.” There’s no “good enough” support in a lot of cases (pure speculation here) because when you have reached the point of willingness to pay for support, you are already signaling that good enough is not good enough for you/your company — you want it done right by experts [*].

I like the idea of free software developers making money by offering support. First, it means that they will keep developing their software, since their financial base depends on loyal users. Second, it means that their lives get easier as the software gets better, so they have an incentive to code smarter. Third, it keeps the software itself open-source and free, with all of the attendant benefits (integration with other products, standardization, volunteer testing and patching, etc.).

[*] I just finished reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, so I’m still thinking about all the ways that firms are sneaking price discrimination under my door. The people that pay for support for software would have been the big corporate customers anyway. Nothing lost by giving it away for free to people that would have (a) done without or (b) pirated it. In fact, a lot is gained in terms of network effects (more people use it so more people are comfortable with it, the file format is widely accepted, name-recognition, and so on).