Conversation

@gleick FWIW, I was with a medium size tech company about 15 years ago, and we had excellent human tech support, and it was rarely needed.
One big reason, IMHO, was that the support budget came out of the sales budget.
The dynamic this setup was that sales was forced to balance "requests for new features" with "cost of supporting poorly designed or executed products".
I think that's a very rare choice these days.