I used to work in Developer Support at Microsoft. I was making really good money, so no complaints from me, but Microsoft was making much better money with me. Every time someone called me for help with debugging a specific problem with their code, they were charged $500 per issue. If they called for advice, then the charge was, depending on complexity, $300 to $800 per hour, no rounding, and billed in advance. Of course, some of them were calling for help with a problem that was losing them anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, so they felt that paying a few hundred for the immediate help of an expert was a good deal. If only I could have directly collected for those years, I'd be e-mailing you all from the satellite network connection aboard my yacht, just off the coast of my own private island, taking a few moments out of the day before I returned to the floating recording studio and/or party already in progress. Of course, MS had a product and support services marketing staff to find me the work, made sure that the customers paid, provided me with other expensive experts to consult at any time of the day or night, unlimited computing resources and a staff of lab techs to setup replicas of the customer's computing environment day or night, and covered the expense of times when I had to let someone know at 3 AM that I needed to be at the customer's location tomorrow, so get me an expensive plane ticket, hotel, and other support services on short notice. All of those people needed to make a living, too, though, so I didn't feel too bad for only getting a portion of those big fees. I still made enough money to now be able to afford to work for a fraction of what I used to make. Hahaha. That sounds like a bad thing, but I like music tech, phone systems, and investing way more than I enjoy debugging middleware applications and helping with project planning for big boring financial systems. Bryan From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of George Bell Sent: Friday, March 04, 2011 11:37 AM To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Motif info Add 50% to that figure, and that's what the garage charges for a grease monkey to service my motor!! Be lucky you don't have to call Microsoft. They charge three times what you've been quoted for a single support call which might last 3 minutes, or indeed 3 hours. And don't even let's go near what accounts and lawyers charge an hour. George. From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cameron Sent: 04 March 2011 16:23 To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Motif info Hi. Wow. Ninety five dollars an hour? Are they smoking crack? Or, do they feel the need to add a few inches to their golden pedestal and require the funds to complete such a project... Most dealers at least offer a limited amount of free or reasonably priced tech support to their customers, especially when you buy a product that costs over a couple grand... Ninety five dollars an hour... I'd like to see the qualifications of every single person on their tech support team. Sorry to rant but I hate seeing peple getting taken advantage of. Please write me off list with the name of the company so I can be sure not to give them any business. Thanks, Cameron. From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Greg Brayton Sent: Friday, March 04, 2011 8:39 AM To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ddots-l] Motif info Is anyone on the list currently subscribed to the motif access list. I'd like to subscribe to that. I'm looking also to have a phone chat with anyone who could help me get started with sequencing. The folks who sold it to me need 95 dollars per hour for tech support, and they reccomend that I record the session, which of course is the right idea. I'm gonna get set up soon to do that but in the mean time I was hoping to just talk a few basics with someone if someone might have the time.