Date: Wed, 8 Jan 97 11:39:52 Pacific Standard Time From: "Sean J. Schluntz" <schluntz@pinpt.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD into larget corp. environment? Message-ID: <Chameleon.852753086.List@journeyman> References: <22430.852285183@time.cdrom.com>
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Greetings Jordan, I have to disagree with you on one point here. > >From my very rough estimates, it would take around $350,000 to hire > the first tech support people and the accountant/office manager, rent > a small office in a not-too-wealthy part of town, get phone lines and > a small PBX installed, run a T1 out from a local ISP and buy a couple > of office server systems. And that's being highly frugal at all > times; taking on full-time employees is just plain expensive, once you > add up all the benefits and 401K plans you're required to make > available. You don't have to have medical, 401k or many of the other niceties for a small start up business. They are costly and many, many small businesses can't afford to have them until they have been running for a while. (We just got medical about a year and a half ago here.) You also wouldn't have to have a large group of people answering phones. One or two who could act at your first line of support who would then contact some of your medium or heavy guns working out of their home's/dorms/closets ;). The first level could have a good database of the archives to do simple searches for the easer questions. Also you would not have to have a T1 when you start. A good CentrexISDN dial up with a small provider would suffice as you could arrange to put a server on their network for when you need the bandwidth and do a trade with them (Tech Servics for the bandwidth.) One of my favorite ISP's here in the South Bay Area called ScruzNet (out of Santa Cruz) was founded by a couple of FreeBSD enthusiasts. They now run FreeBSD and NetBSD on their network. A CentrexISDN full time dial up only costs about $350 a month if you are in one of the areas that are serviced. I have been playing with all of these things here in this office, when I took over the Tech Support dept here it was only me and one other person handling all of the calls. (I guess you couldn't really call that a department ;) If you try you can make a really excellent support group work with the bare essentials. If you all were to do something like this I would be willing to donate time to help get it started, I really like FreeBSD and think that the core team is doing a really good job. -Sean ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean J. Schluntz <schluntz@pinpt.com> Manager, Support Services ph. 408.997.6900 x222 PinPoint Software Corporation fx. 408.323.2300 6155 Almaden Expressway, Suite 100 San Jose, CA. 95120 http://www.pinpt.com/ Local Time Sent: 01/08/97 11:39:52 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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