Future of Customer Support???

[RWK@FUJI.ILA.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (Robert W. Kerns)]

    Date: Mon, 28 May 90 15:20 PDT
    From: Eric Weaver <weaver@russian.spa.symbolics.com>

    [West Coast Software Support] was also the brainchild of one of the
    zillion past managers, one
    Larry Rostetter, whose plan it was to move them all to Chatsworth
    "because there's nowhere else to go there" thus they would be a captive
    labor market.    There's lots more interesing philosophy where this came
    from.  7thson, are you out there?

I've always referred to Chatsworth Support as "The Ghost of Larry Rostetter".
It's my understanding that he was behind DEC's creation of their Denver
software support operation, which always seemed to me to have the same
problems that the Symbolics version had.  Some people just don't learn...

I refer to it as his "ghost", since he was gone by the time it actually
happened, but his bad ideas lived on.

Anyway, it's too bad they're fixing this now, instead of back when they had
the resources to do it right!  Especially since they've already invested so
much in training and making it work.  I'm seriously concerned that this may
be yet another case of "too little, too late".  But I do think it's necessary,
even if late.

The HOSS-East group was one of the most cohesive and enthusiastic groups in
the company, and they destroyed it to "consolidate" it on the West Coast.

This is no reflection on the people now doing the support; I think they had the
odds stacked against them, in the form of bad logistics, bad communications,
and bad management.  [Those who know me can guess just which management I am
refering to.  It's not their immediate manager.]  This makes their successes
all the more noteworthy.