The Expense of Failed Knowledge Transfer

J.D. Meier posted a great comment to my recent post on Community Facilitates Knowledge Transfer (emphasis mine):

"Shipping the knowledge is just as important as shipping the product" ... YES! ... and a product without knowledge is support waiting to happen! - JD

Source: Rob Caron : Community Facilitates Knowledge Transfer

It's very much a case of "pay now, or pay more later" when it comes to product and technology knowledge transfer. It's a well-established fact within Microsoft that self-support within a healthy community is cheaper than calls to support engineers (somewhere north of 10x). And that's before you take into account the cost of eroded customer satisfaction when they aren't able to quickly find answers to their questions.

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