Did you know - Cheaper no call option for Developer Support

Did you know you could submit your request for product support to Microsoft online?  And, if you do this and you have allready used your included suppor tickets... it's $150 cheaper? 

https://support.microsoft.com/gp/assistsupport - Pick a product, in my case VS 2005, and then you'll see this page.

I honestly didn't know this option existing before visiting the Developer Support center this week.  I honestly don't know why more people don't use it.  Most of the engineers here seem to think that this is less than 10% of thier volume, but it's a cheaper option for the customer.  And often times, you'll get a call back from the support engineer regardless of which method you submitted your request. 

In the next year I'd love to see if there is a way we could simply give people an option to "escalate" to support via a cheap method like this from our community support options like the https://forums.microsoft.com/msdn if you don't get an answer from the community.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 16, 2006
  For developer support the MSDN managed newsgroups still seem to be the best option, during times when the developer has an active MSDN subscription and for products that have MSDN managed newsgroups.
  
  For ordinary victim support there's still no option.  Even the first page that you linked to says that if the victim was forced to buy whichever OS together with buying their computer, then the victim cannot use this method to report a bug.  The victim still has to pay for a support incident in order to report an OS bug.
• Anonymous
  February 16, 2006
  Norman: You are wrong about one thing. If you are reporting something that is determined to be a bug... there is no charge to you.  
  
  
• Anonymous
  February 19, 2006
  Friday, February 17, 2006 2:16 AM by jledgard
  > If you are reporting something that is determined to be
  > a bug... there is no charge to you.
  
  I've read that rumour a number of times but have never found any correct[] way to accomplish it.  Some years ago I tried to submit some through your company's web site but the web server detected the "OEM" part of the Windows product key and rejected me for the same reason which the web site still says today.  Regarding phone calls or any other official contact, since I couldn't even get hotfixes that are mentioned in Knowledge Base articles, the idea of getting a bug report submitted seems pretty far fetched, without paying a fee.
  
  [ 1. I don't know if it's possible to use an MSDN incident which is intended for development issues but use it to report a bug in OEM Windows which I was not allowed to avoid buying when buying hardware.  Even if MSDN allows it, it's not the correct solution for ordinary victims.
  
  2. Even when Microsoft accidentally allowed me to communicate with a support manager, the manager did not impose a fee for discussing the bug, but said that Microsoft would never consider trying to fix it unless I paid a support fee.  If not for that accident, then even to get to the point where this refusal occured, there was no correct way to get there without paying a fee.
  
  3. One Microsoft employee once contacted me and offered to send me hotfixes for which some Knowledge Base articles said that hotfixes could be obtained from Microsoft support.  He asserted that I could get them from Microsoft support, so I tried that.  When I phoned Microsoft support to ask for hotfixes, your company refused to even let me state the Knowledge Base article numbers unless I paid a support fee first.  Anyway your colleague's offer by e-mail wasn't a correct way to do it, and I didn't take him up on it.]