It takes a village

The next time you really want to get a software vendor’s attention, don’t bother threatening to take your business elsewhere. That’s like an unhappy patient threatening to move to another hospital — they’ll be glad to see you go. Instead, tell the vendor you’ll bring your issues to the developer community for resolution.

The self-support and developer communities that vendors build and foster, or ones that bubble up in spite of vendors, are becoming a customer’s best friend. When vendors participate in them in a forthright way, these communities are an efficient, inexpensive way to connect with customers, potential customers, and the developers who extend commercial products.

Most vendors are turning top-level customer support and developer relations into profit centers. Large-scale accounts and major partners expect excellence in these areas. An account with sufficient cash can have a vendor vice president on its doorstep to replace a scratched CD.

There is no equivalent to this for SMB (small to midsize business) accounts. Although every major software vendor is creating SMB editions of its products, the SMB customer experience is quite different. Either customers must pay support charges grossly disproportionate to license fees, or they must settle for second-class support: banker’s hours, 48-hour turnaround, and scores of  low-level flowchart readers instead of knowledgeable personnel on the help line.

Although SMBs can’t demand weekends on vendors’ private yachts, they should assert their significant influence on software companies. Accounts of all sizes must evaluate each potential vendor’s customer and developer programs. Wherever you find vibrant, open, and inclusive vendor communities, you’ll find responsive vendors behind them. When you encounter gated or absent communities, you can be sure that your relationship with that vendor will be strictly a dime a dance.

The needs of SMBs, enthusiasts, casual developers, and small-scale enterprise deployments overlap in ways that make communities essential. If you’d like to see an example of communities done right, look at Apple. Apple hosts vibrant open forumswith very little moderation and aids third-party community sites even if they break disclosure rules or rag on Apple now and then.  An item on the Apple Menu, “Mac OS X Software,” doesn’t take you to Apple’s online store, but to the company’s catalog of open source, shareware, and commercial software. Everyone with a Mac gets free membership in Apple’s Developer Connection, which includes a full set of professional development tools. In many ways, the Mac is as much a community as it is a platform. Apple’s responsiveness bodes as well for businesses as it does for students and open source hackers.

After many fits and starts, Microsoft is starting to reach out in some rather Apple-like ways. Releasing Services for Unix, holding developer contests, and giving once-expensive session DVDs to all conference attendees are moves straight out of the Apple playbook. I’m told that Microsoft will be hosting software catalogs soon.

Just as you wouldn’t move into a new house without checking out the neighborhood, don’t buy into software solutions until you have checked out the surrounding communities and the vendor’s involvement in them.