Customer support? What's that?
In the process of attempting to show Laura how NaturallySpeaking's voice recognition works, I somehow managed to snap the included headset into two pieces. Bear in mind, I've only had it for a couple months. No abuse, just some casual usage. What a cheap pile of junk. So I was gonna send a support e-mail, in the hopes of getting a new one.
ScanSoft, the makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have the worst customer support ever. From their support page:
Online Support Options
ScanSoft Support provides free self-service support for ScanSoft products. ScanSoft Support allows individual users to resolve technical problems online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through the use of Product updates and the ScanSoft Support Knowledge Base, which contains answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ), technical notes User Guides. There is also an active ScanSoft User Community that provides an online forum for tips, advice and information sharing.
(Read: If you fix the problem yourself, you don't have to pay.)
Email Support Options
Individual users can also interact with ScanSoft Technical Support through a pay per-incident email process. Incidents can be reported by completing the Problem Report Form at a cost of $9.95 per incident.
(Read: It costs a large pizza to even talk to us.)
Kevin Gadd said it best: "do they like, not want customers?"
Update1: I go through mice and hard drives like water. Newegg likes me.
Update2: I upgraded to the new RSIGuard 4.0. The UI is streamlined a little bit (but not in the ways I'd like, such as being able to force breaks without bringing the window up) but it's still darn ugly. And there are some obvious bugs too, for that matter. Maybe I'll downgrade for a while.
By the way, if you want a minimalistic RSIGuard-like program for *n?x, check out xwrits. The options are pretty cool, too.
http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/xwrits/
That guy. How silly.
The reason "support" becomes a pay feature is because people pirate the software, so no sense wasting time answering questions when you don't even know if they bought your product. The pay ploy allows to check against licenses and optional decline.
You could enforce that without charging dollars.