VPC Officially Dead

In article ,
Steve Jain wrote:

> On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 06:35:15 -0600, Richard Cardona
> wrote:
>
> >Helpful Harry wrote:
> >> And hence the product is dead.
> >
> >VirtualPC for Mac is DEAD, Long Live Virtual PC Technical Support!
>
> So what is a product that a company no longer provides technical
> support for, if a dead product still gets techical support?
>
> A really dead product, a really, really, really dead product, an
> undead product, a double-dead product?
>
> It can't be dead if you can get help with it. In my experience with
> VPC-Mac over the past 6 years, MOST of the problems MOST users faced
> didn't need patches or updates, but just config help.

I used to work for Symantec, as a senior technical support engineer for
Symantec Gateway Security and Symantec Enterprise Firewall. In 2006
they decided to discontinue the product, and laid off many of the
developers. They kept some of them for bug fixing, and all the
technical support staff, but made it clear that they were planning on
transfering them to other products -- they expected the customers to
migrate to other products as their support contracts expired, so there
would be fewer support calls over time, and thus fewer support engineers
needed.

Most of us were not interested in hanging around, working on a dead-end
product, nor were we interested in supporting any of Symantec's other
products (many of my coworkers had been part of the Axent acquisition
several years earlier -- they had little experience or interest in the
Norton side of the company). I was one of the first to abandon ship,
but several others left within months.

The point of this is that even though the company may officially be
providing technical support, it's likely that the quality of this
support will fall off drastically. Most highly skilled engineers are
interested in working on active projects. So the people you'll find at
the other end of the line for a dead product will be entry-level, or
people who are supporting a variety of products; either way, they're not
going to be experts on this one.

--
Barry Margolin, barmar.DeleteThis@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

In article ,
Barry Margolin wrote:

> In article ,
> Steve Jain wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 06:35:15 -0600, Richard Cardona
> > wrote:
> >
> > >Helpful Harry wrote:
> > >> And hence the product is dead.
> > >
> > >VirtualPC for Mac is DEAD, Long Live Virtual PC Technical Support!
> >
> > So what is a product that a company no longer provides technical
> > support for, if a dead product still gets techical support?
> >
> > A really dead product, a really, really, really dead product, an
> > undead product, a double-dead product?
> >
> > It can't be dead if you can get help with it. In my experience with
> > VPC-Mac over the past 6 years, MOST of the problems MOST users faced
> > didn't need patches or updates, but just config help.
>
> I used to work for Symantec, as a senior technical support engineer for
> Symantec Gateway Security and Symantec Enterprise Firewall. In 2006
> they decided to discontinue the product, and laid off many of the
> developers. They kept some of them for bug fixing, and all the
> technical support staff, but made it clear that they were planning on
> transfering them to other products -- they expected the customers to
> migrate to other products as their support contracts expired, so there
> would be fewer support calls over time, and thus fewer support engineers
> needed.
>
> Most of us were not interested in hanging around, working on a dead-end
> product, nor were we interested in supporting any of Symantec's other
> products (many of my coworkers had been part of the Axent acquisition
> several years earlier -- they had little experience or interest in the
> Norton side of the company). I was one of the first to abandon ship,
> but several others left within months.
>
> The point of this is that even though the company may officially be
> providing technical support, it's likely that the quality of this
> support will fall off drastically. Most highly skilled engineers are
> interested in working on active projects. So the people you'll find at
> the other end of the line for a dead product will be entry-level, or
> people who are supporting a variety of products; either way, they're not
> going to be experts on this one.

"Support" can stay around for decades, especially in an unofficial or
semi-official form (just look at the Amiga computer) or simply in a
companise web-archives, but once a company decides to stop making a
product it is officially dead ... no matter what a few hard core
fanatics on the Internet like to fool themselves into believing or how
many largely pointless petition attempts to have that decision revoked
are created. You see this all the time in the TV newsgroups - the
network decides to cancel a show and all the loonies come out of the
woodwork with "Save the show" petitions. :o\


Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)