Deane writes:
> We've considered dropping annual support on several of our HP3000
> 3rd-party software packages (as the hardware system 'slides out the door')
> in favor of paying single-incident support charges as they occur.  At
> least one company we've contacted (nameless for now) has indicated that
> their single incident charge is equivalent to their annual contract which
> seems rather excessive to me.

Well, their cost to provide support may not change dramatically as a
function of the number of incidents they have to respond to.

Support (at least for the relatively low-volume high-priced world that is
the HP 3000) is not so much a "service" that you pay for as an insurance
policy that you buy.  The cost of delivering support may be all about
"overhead" (maintaining the expertise and the people on call, sometimes
around the clock) and very little about the actual time spent on each call.

Sales of even the most popular HP 3000 applications and tools are often best
measured in units of "hundreds", unlike the hundreds of thousands or even
millions that you see in the PC world, which is also why HP 3000 products
cost thousands of dollars rather than hundreds or even tens of dollars as PC
products do.

I suspect that there may not be many (if any) HP 3000 software or hardware
vendors who would stay in business if they only charged "per incident"
support fees (at least not without charging per-incident fees that would
seem excessive to most people).

G.

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