Idea: Linux for Home

[Brian Fahrlander]

John Richard Moser wrote:
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> Consider the following (sorry for top posting but this is organized).
> 
>  - You can get away with paying a phone/shell support tech $13/hr
> 
>  - You can get away with paying a tech who goes out $18/hr
> 
>  - You will probably average $2/hr higher than these for starting
>    salaries
> 
>  - You need one tech on call per hour per volume of traffic per tech in
>    that hour; so if a tech can handle 5 calls and you get 10 calls an
>    hour between noon and 3pm, you need 2 techs during that time
> 
>  - You don't need to pay yourself, initially (get a real job)
> 
> With 24 hour coverage your minimal costs will fall into $288/day range.
>  You could get 2 techs to cover 10 incidents per hour and bring that
> into the $576/10 == $57.60/day range per customer at 1 incident per hour
> per customer; but you won't start with that many issues.
> 
> Two important things come from this:
> 
>  - Every customer does not generate one incident per hour.  You may have
>    100 customers and generate 1 incident per hour.  This means that
>    $288/day becomes $2.88/day cost per customer.  Most importantly, new
>    customers will invariably have dozens of incidents at first and then
>    stfu; a knowledge base can squelch most of these incidents (techs say
>    "Here's our support page on this" and that incident takes 2 minutes
>    to read, locate, respond; do 30 per hour per tech).
> 
>  - You won't get the volume you need at first; and when you do you can't
>    respond in real time.  You need to work by yourself first, and you
>    need to deal with support in a ticketed fashion, collecting the
>    incident and dealing with it from the queue.

   Well, all of this is good, sound advice, *if* I wasn't back to 
flint-n-steel here. I have to find money for flyers...I won't be paying 
*anyone* for quite a long time.

   I came here seven years ago...to take care of Mom...a three hour tour.

    :>

   But what you've given me can serve as metrics for the eventual 
organization; it frames the road ahead- thank you.  I have some thinking 
to do.

   Eventually there will be technical details, but I think I should move 
this thread to sounder, until it does. A tiny amount of 
central-organization from Canonical could go a long way; I'm starting to 
see this as a 'franchise' open to all of us...

   Thanks again!

-- 
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  Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
  Evansville, IN                              http://Fahrlander.net/brian
  ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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