In a recent weblog item, I talked about the owner of a new PC who had to pay $149 for Dell support to tell her how to change a default setting in Outlook. This spurred quite a debate among readers about just who was to blame.
As the OEM, many readers felt it was completely Dell's responsibility. "I have a rhetorical question for Dell," wrote one reader. "If they are always bragging in their commercials that 'award-winning service comes standard,' then why charge $149 for software support? Isn't that an option and not a standard? I haven't bought a PC from Dell, but if I paid $1600 for a PC I would expect support to come standard, since they are selling me a complete PC which includes Microsoft products. If that's the case, then the standard support should extend to those included products."
Others pointed the finger at Microsoft for not making it clear how to turn on such a simple function as reading e-mail attachments. "I think most of us here can agree that Microsoft bears the primary blame," wrote another reader. "Microsoft is notorious for not having answers for obvious questions and insane look-up terms. But it is hard to understand how Dell can charge $149 to answer a common and trivially easy question. If questions like this are costing them real money, then they should be telling Microsoft and requiring better documentation."
But a number of readers insisted that the user herself was at fault. "Not surprised by anything in this story other than she agreed to pay the ridiculous amount for that level of 'support,'" wrote one. "Anyone who has had access to the Internet for more than a week knows that you can find just about any information you need, including help with something like this. Yes, shame on Dell for making PCs from poor quality parts and having horrible support that is outsourced to another country -- putting Americans out of jobs. And, yes, shame on Microsoft for not providing better information in standard Help files, but shame on the user for not being more aggressive in finding help that does not cost an arm and a leg for such a routine function."
And those who blamed the customer came in for some criticism themselves. "I don't ever want you as my support people, no matter how good you are," wrote another reader. "I've spent years in minicomputer maintenance, desktop support and other facets of the business. And when I have a problem, it's my contention that I should be able to call the manufacturer of the PC or the software and get an answer -- immediately and for free. I should not have to hassle with digging through the Internet, hours on end, searching for an answer and then spend hours more trying to figure out how to decipher what I've just read and implement the fix, even if that's what I do for a living. They're not paying me; I'm paying them. It's time for PC and software manufacturers to wake up and realize who the customer is here."
Read or post comments to this story here.
12:36:38 AM 
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