My, I'd not expected this to spark all this controversy :) Maybe I should've left the subject as 'Re: Support woes' so everyone would've ignored it ;)

I'd agree that the car comparison that everyone makes falls down in that area, that modifications are made by professionals not by inexperienced users themselves. However, the point I was making in particular (somewhat off the original outsourcing topic but note I was replying to another poster) is that PC operating systems in general have not yet matured to a point where they are easy to use yet hard to break.

That the average user is even exposed directly to ALL files on the hard drive (worse, often with admin privileges) is testament to the failure of abstraction of user interface.

A PC ultimately is a collection of tools. The tools themselves need to know how a PC works, what goes where etc. The user does not. All the user should need to know is how to use those tools - this includes how to use them safely but the tools should assist in this, not throw up their collective hands and say 'the user did that; not our problem'. To continue the car analogy that's been done to death, most cars will warn the user if the oil is too hot etc - they don't just keep going and blow up, or as the Unix-Haters Handbook put it, put a single large ? on the dashboard and hope the user knows what's going wrong. If the user ignores the warning, then too right it's their fault. That doesn't mean software designers or tech-support have carte-blanche to assume that everything is the user's fault and do nothing to help them or protect them.

To get this vaguely back on topic, I'd agree with other posters that outsourcing simply does not help the issue. Things are bad enough without all the extra hassle.

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