reporting to customer reports.

[dmitchell@APCTRC.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)]

    Date: Mon, 3 Dec 90 17:15 PST
    From: CStacy@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Christopher Stacy)

	Date: Mon, 3 Dec 90 19:32 EST
	From: pc@ctt.ctt.bellcore.com (Peter Clitherow)

	I've sent a few (3 or so) reports in to
		"customer-reports@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com"
	over the last two weeks or so.  i've had no response at all from them,
	not even an acknowledgement of the form ".... has been assigned incident
	number <90-12-03....>".

    Your reports are being received, and are waiting to be handled by some
    (slightly backlogged) software support person.

Sometime last summer Symbolics changed their software support categories to
basic, basic+, and red phone where there's an additional $200/month charge (my
cost, yours may vary) for basic+ and it "guarantees" a 24 hour response and a
$500/month surcharge for red phone with a "guaranteed" 2 hour response.
Seeing that under my current support I've almost never seen quicker than 3 or
5 day response and often no response (I am paying for support), I wonder what
quality and quickness of response people who are purchasing the new surcharged
packages are seeing?  Paying $6M per year over and above the basic $4.5M for
software support to cover my 4 hosts seems painful unless people really are
seeing quality and timely response.  I'm afraid that all I'll see is that they
will pass the problem to the developers and get back to me whenever the
developers respond (which is almost always what I hear now).

A related question is whether the people not purchasing the guaranteed
response packages are guaranteed to ever get a response?  Is it up to
Symbolics to decide whether to respond to a bug report?

Don Mitchell			dmitchell@trc.amoco.com
Amoco Production Company	(918) 660-4270
Tulsa Research Center
P.O. Box 3385, Tulsa, OK 74102