Day: August 5, 2010

How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff

How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff:

It will probably surprise you to find out that we actually have no dedicated support personnel inside of New Relic! Each and every support request is handled by a development engineer who has full access to our entire source base, and the full authority to do whatever is necessary to make things right.

and

Until then, I think it’s great that our development engineers have responsibility not only for writing great software, but supporting it too. In the long run, I think it makes for happier customers and a better product.

[Makes sense to me… (Disclosure, we use the service…)]

The danger in relying on *sophisticated virtual design tools*

QUOTE: The danger in relying on [sophisticated virtual design tools] too much is that we can end up isolated from the physical world. In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves—’I press too hard here, and it breaks here’ and so on…It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it.

—Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, discussing materials and the iPhone 4

[I mentioned this before. Living only in a digital, virtual world lacks balance and doesn’t engage senses that we’ve developed over lifetimes.]

Source: SIGNAL VS. NOISE