Support boundary guidelines

A recurring question for support technicians of all kinds is "Well, why *don't* you support that?" Often it is phrased more as "Why won't you help me?", which is a bit more poignant and personal. This is a discussion of the why of support boundaries in general and of the specific boundaries we have at Free Geek.

The first reason for having support boundaries in the first place is that it is time-consuming and costly to be an expert in all things, so we specialize. You would not come to me with a broken leg to fix, and I would not take my broken computer to a doctor. While it may seem like a computer tech should be able to handle computer problems in general, that is not the case. I have supported Microsoft Windows issues in the past, but can no longer consider myself an expert in it, and so do not support Windows, even for friends and relatives.

Second is the need to limit the range of possible problems and solutions. Think of every computer issue as the camel's nose. Once the nose is in the door, eventually the whole camel is in the door, and we want to limit the possible size of the camel. At Free Geek we work only on our own hardware in part because if a problem is too intractable, we know we can just replace the box with something similar. If we work on someone else's hardware we have no such option. To give an example, suppose someone comes in with a $5000 computer and wants help with it, and it completely fails while in our hands. Whether through our fault or no, we are suddenly responsible for $5000 worth of equipment.

Third is the need for consistency. If an adopter comes in to Tech Support and gets help on his issue from one tech, he will expect support on that same issue from any other tech. He does not think "Elaine helped me", but "Free Geek helped me", and will be frustrated if he comes in again and can't get help from Free Geek on that same issue.

So why don't we support Windows? Mostly for the first reason above. We like Linux and have chosen to promote and support it and really don't have time or resources to do anything else. We are not trying to block people from putting Windows on their computers. We just think Linux is a better choice.

Linux has advantages of security, adaptability, and ease of install on a wide variety of hardware. Yes, Windows is in many cases harder to install and configure than Linux on much of the hardware we provide. When a major computer manufacturer puts an operating system on their hardware, they include many hardware drivers that aren't actually part of Windows, which brings up the second reason, the camel's nose. If you install Windows on the hodgepodge of hardware we put together, these drivers have to be installed to make the hardware usable. This is possible to do, but is a potentially long and annoying task which we really don't want to do, especially given that most of the hardware we use "just works" with a standard Ubuntu install. The exceptions (some wireless cards, dialup modems, and printers for example) are few enough that we are willing to live with it.