Updating Free Software Can Be Costly
The nice thing about offering free software is that there’s no need for customer support. It’s always someone else that has to clean up the mess.
Selling something, anything, implies an enforceable responsibility for performance, and being attuned to the vagaries and discipline of a marketplace. There can be no tort if no money changed hands, and in any event software has protected itself with carefully crafted user agreements that put the customer at a decided disadvantage.
Increasingly, the one who gets the angry phone call is not even remotely responsible for the new problem, but whose paying customer expects them to fix the other guy’s problem, for free no less.
This is particularly true with web browsers. Firefox’s frequent updates, for example, sometimes break things that weren’t broken. Google’s chrome defaults textareas to be resizable, which results in some interesting problems, which can only be fixed in cascading style sheets, not only introducing a dependency but also increasing maintenance efforts.
Paying customers are not amused by techies’ changing things without cause and demonstrably without testing, and the indifference to others’ time and money really grates. Those who provide browser based products and services can be at the mercy of these changes and updates, and are the only visible and available touch points that the customer has, so guess who gets the angry phone call.
Forewarned is forearmed, but even when getting the customer to recognize that other software failures can break our software doesn’t really go down well when the inevitable happens and their business web sites break.
What goes around comes around, and those who don’t care will eventually be paid back by those with long memories, particularly if they’ve been burned with this casual indifference more than once.
© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: customer support, free software, inadequate software testing, program updates, sloppy software design, software torts