Comment by nathanwdavis
16 years ago
What amazes me about this story is that back in '89 MS had a knowledge base that worked so well that a person not trained for customer service was able to provide the help needed just by looking in the knowledge base. Many companies still don't have a system that good yet.
At my previous company, we had a great (and horrible) knowledge base. We could search all bug reports, knowledge base articles and previous calls to tech support. Even with all the great content, it takes more than a search to solve the issues. It takes knowledge of the product which is assumed in the notes. It also takes the ability to listen to an issue from a customer, figure out from their problem which is the key factor, what to search for, and how to figure out which search result helps this issue.
I have heard Bill Gates was a very hands on manager, especially back the, so I assume he knew the products reasonably well. And I know he is very intelligent, so I assume he would be decent at troubleshooting. But as another noted above, he didn't actually solve the issue for the customer.
The application sucked, was IE6 only, search was horrendous, but the content was good.
Having used that system, I'm surprised that in 2009 most companies still don't have something as useful. Shocking really...
What was Microsoft's product line in 1989? MS/DOS, Word, Excel and Windows 2.0?
It also included compilers and, specifically to the problem the user called in about, a linker. Compilers and linkers are no simple matter to support, particularly in those days.
OS/2