In today's market, people expect a product to work immediately as it's taken out of the box. If it doesn't, i.e. if the purchaser has to call "support" in order to get it working, as he imagines it should, even if that's not the way it should work, he's likely to buy someone else's product next time. The problem lies somewhere between marketing and engineering, even though it's disguised under "SUPPORT." Marketing makes claims in their advertisement that engineering can't meet, and support has to provide the reasons why.

I recently bought a fairly large external disk drive from one of the major manufacturers. In order to get it to work, I had to spend a considerable amount of time on the phone with their tech support people, located in India or Pakistan, apparently, who didn't speak English very clearly and didn't have a particularly good telephone system. This was VERY annoying, and, I can assure you, next time I buy a similar product, I'll look long and hard at other manufacturers' offerings before I consider theirs again.

Likewise, not so long ago, I bought a product from NetGear, whose products I've used for years, and with whose products I've been, ultimately, satisfied, once they are properly installed. It's a small enclosure for disk drives that enables network access to the drives in the box. I did that, BTW, after finding the USB-interfaced TB drive previously mentioned to be such a disappointment. I had to update the software that was shipped with the unit, and I had to spend hours on the phone with "tech-support" trying to explain the problems I was experiencing. For years, NetGear has been my LAST choice of suppliers, yet I buy their products because their prices are favorable. Once installed, they work fine. If I could avoid the installation hassles, however, I'd happily pay 15% more, even though that 15% will be spread over, say, 15 years of service.

Most of the products I buy simply function as expected when taken out of the box and installed.

RE