What is the (Tech Support) Future of Radio?

Is it possible that by producing a very low cost, high cool-factor, consumer oriented web tool like RadioUserland, that Userland has in fact painted itself into a corner? (I really hope not.)

I'm on the Radio mailing lists. I've seen the numbers that indicate many thousands of Radio sites have been set up in the last week.

Who's going to support all these people? These guys don't have to be webmasters or techies like Conversant's users (or even Manila's users, to some extent). These are consumers.

They are the sort of people who send in scads of bug reports like, "My macro isn't working. Why not?". They don't tell you what site they're working on, or where to look. They don't give you their account information. They don't tell you what "isn't working" means. They might tell you which macro they're talking about, if you're lucky. Yet, they're using a commercial product and they want support. They deserve support.

It's not their fault that they're not techies: this is the nature of the business.

Radio's most basic features are simple enough that anyone with a computer can have a web site -- with a weblog -- within 30 minutes. I've seen it for myself, it really is that simple. Unfortunately for UserLand, that also means they're going to have to provide tech support for these "anybodies".

I haven't talked to them. Maybe they have a plan. Maybe it's going to be a user-supported community, justified by the low cost of the software (ouch). Maybe they're going to offer real tech support for a fee.

Maybe they had no idea Radio was going to be so popular, so quickly.

I really don't want to sound like a doomsayer. This isn't some sorty of prophecy of the end of Userland, or whatever... I just hate the idea of all of these users having problems and Userland not having the resources to support them.

(Is there an industry metric for determining an acceptable ratio of users to "full time support staff" for a technical product?)

Update: Jeff Cheney says that the ratio of users to technicians at Quark was 5000 to 1, although that was pre-web.

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RE: ratio of users to tech support staff

On 1/20/2002 at 5:24 PM, Jeff Cheney wrote:

>When I worked in Quark's technical support department we had a ratio
>of 1 technician per 5000 customers. But that was ten years ago --
>before the web took off.

Excellent, thank you. It's great to get a real answer to that question!

The web could improve that metric somewhat, I think. I wonder what Quark's current ratio is.

Unfortunately Radio is entirely different from XPress. It's much deeper, and much less expensive. The number of things that "Curious George User" could do to Radio to mess it up is... well, there's really no limit.

Seth

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Dave Responds Re: Supporting Radio

Dave Winer saw my comments on supporting Radio, and responded on his own site (the numbers are mine):

[1] We're selling into corporations, government and education through consultants and VARs, they support their installations. [2] Our core users will be like the hobbyists from the early days of personal computing who launched companies like Apple and Microsoft (and Borland, Lotus, Software Publishing, Symantec, etc). [3] Enthusiastic supporters of the technology who want to see us gain traction and keep improving the software.

He didn't really answer my concerns, but it's still worth responding to.

1. I'm a Frontier consultant and software developer (duh), but I didn't know that. It's stated in the present tense, "we're selling ... through consultants and VAR's". Does this mean I've been left out, or is this still being planned? (I'm guessing the latter.)

2. Wow, he's thinking big. ;-)

3. I count myself in this group.

Some friends have written to express some sort of "condolences" over how hard it must be to watch Radio get all this attention (because of Conversant). Not so! Radio and Conversant are not even on the same planet, let alone the same market space. As I've said before, I like Radio, I use Radio, and I'll even recommend Radio. In fact, we (myself, and others from the past-and-present Macrobyte team) are discussing the possibility of making them work together on a deeper level than one might expect. ;-)

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