- Have you tried new days software/sites like CD rippers or ‘Build a wiki sites’…you are guided to do..and thats what every body love in this world. A system ‘assume’ the user to be ‘intelligent’for the system, it should just support him/her to do his task – be it copying a CD, playing a song (apple), withdrawing money from ATM, or closing the ERP Books.An IT system is just a matter of time, tomorrow some new system and replaces todays.This is its destiniy – it should never humiliate the users for the purpose of its existence.

Oracle makes a lot of money from making complex system doesnot means that its justified. Politicians also spent a lot of money in building roads and bridges, which, with time, keep on costing more and more making the politicians/cotractors richer and richer.

Yes, ERP really benefits as they help in tracking, monitoring, contrlling, reporting, accessing, securing and playing with the data. But what I think is that its not the WEB that is going to help to improve them,its the owner companies which have to innovate themselves. Eg. Yahoo and MSN mails was worlds best
till the time Gmail came. All were free, but simple concepts of gmails and its user friendly approach was well accepted by the audience – like the related mail feature, or search feature, or chat with your buddy in the mail – this must have given a bang on the head of yahoo/MSN teams and so they too copied.tomorrow somebody will innovate more and improve the user experince. Idea is simple – let the user be free to do more thinking elsewhere – make system as simple as possible.

First of all I will like thanks for giving time to reply on my thoughts.

- VC++/VB, I coded for about 4 years, and all my teams and collegues agreed in those years that the best help they ever got was always on MSDN,after pressing F1. In those days, Internet forums/sites provided few more example , just to allow us to negotiate on time or memory eaten up by various codes.

- now I trains ERP system to end users. Sadly to say but somedays I feel its really a painful \’change\’ for the end users. Those guys end up doing 100s of actions on a \’highly integrated\’ systems (aka ERPs) which provide great output indeed, but at the cost of the pain felt at the users. eg. Oracle FA system – try to compare the number of steps you do depreciate 500 asstes in an ERP with PO,AP,Project,GL , FA systems in place with an excel-type system doing it in 1 or 2 formula. eg2. – compare the WinXP with the Unix V where you have to run an MP3 file copied on your pen drive – I bet you will love to do it 100 times again on XP.

- Is there any module in Oracle/SAP/Siebel that says \

Thanks for the interesting comment. I agree with you on that user friendly software is very important.

Talking about Excel/Word, you may end up simple concepts of Excel using the F1 technique. What about writing Macros? You will definitely search for help or use a book. Can you learn Visual Basic or Visual C++ using F1? Maybe. Why does a company make one product userfriendly and another non userfriendly? The key difference is that one product is simple other is complicated.

One of the key components of user friendlyness is simplicity. Make a software user friendly by keeping it enormously simple. Some companies have been very successful in doing this. For instance, Apple does not sell a product, it sells you an experience. User Friendlyness is no doubt a key component of Self Support 2.0. But, you can make a complex software userfriendly only to a certain extent. What beyond that? User friendlyness is also relative.

Oracle’s not only spends a lot of money on Support, but also make most of their revenue by providing support.

As of today, its not possible to build Self Support 2.0 into software through user friendlyness. But, when someone manages to do that, that would no doubt be the next big thing. Who knows.

Thanks for this fantastic example. This perfectly compliments the central idea of my post. Your blog on Support 2.0 is very thought provoking and you will find me commenting there regularly.

By the way, I will try to do something to increase the comment length to save people trouble of splitting the posts.

The reality is that the help we used to find via Google in five minutes now took the vendor a day to turn around and get us an answer. And the help that used to take a few hours or overnight via Usenet newsgroups now took the vendor a week before they found someone of sufficient technical capability to be able to answer our question.

Our formerly passionate and dedicated team grew dissatisfied and unproductive. Instead of moving at web speed, we were forced to sit and wait days to be able to move forward. It was the single most unproductive change that could have been made: and the difference was all in the support model: open support versus closed support. Support 2.0 versus Support 1.0.

I have more stories like this and more information about Support 2.0 on my blog at <a href=\

I couldn’t agree more about the importance of Support 2.0. Many companies looking into using social media for customer support are focused on the cost advantages (avoid phone calls, customers generate content), but they miss the most important part: the support that you, as a customer, get with Support 2.0 is far superior to anything a company can generate on their own internally and by relegating the support function to a support-only department.

I had the experience many years ago of developing Java web applications. We were using strictly open source: Apache web server, MySQL, and and an open source J2EE platform, whose names escapes me at the moment.

Our development team worked at, well, web speeds. We liked to turn around releases every one to two weeks, and we were learning as we went. As you can imagine, when we ran into questions, we Googled them, and typically had an answer within a few minutes. On rare occasions we would post to a Usenet newsgroup, and get an answer later that day or by the next morning. We loved our development environment and choice of technology.

Then our employer (a large IT company) forced us to migrate to a proprietary J2EE server. (continued)

Thanks for the interesting comment. Let me elaborate on my point further. You need traditional support for any production environment. Goes without saying. If you are selling a product, traditional support has to be delivered, either by you or through some other means. If you want to be successful and ensure that your product is widely accepted, you need to look at Self Support 2.0 quotient. Thats where the key is.

But regarding your point of Self Support 2.0 being the future and IT companies preferring them over traditional Support, well that looks more like a sort of an overstatement. If Traditional support goes away, then most of the big companies would be out of business and the whole Free & open Source Software world would be left without a business model. The best example here is the GNU/Linux operating system. Many of us have been using the self support mode to learn things but traditional support for GNU/Linux has been on a tremendous increase in the past few years.. So what will happen is that self support will continue to grow as you say, but will not replace traditional support. They both are gonna co exist and traditional support is going to improve a lot and its demand is going to increase but not decrease.