A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUTER SERVICE

The computer service industry has seen many incarnations in the past 10 years. It went from being a field dominated by technical wizards who were more often than not, uninterested and perhaps unable to communicate their knowledge to the average person in need of service.

The next stop was having a "friend" or "cousin" who knew something about computers, come and fix your problems or hook up a network in your office. This approach often resulted in extremely strange (non-standard) methods and installations that required lots of fiddling and when your "friend" or "cousin" became unavailable (or got a real job), you were stuck scratching your head.

Then came the slick, briefcase-carrying consultants who had no more knowledge than most novice computer users, but they had something else – a con and a contract. People wanted service and some reliability, so the slick salesperson would sell a service contract that you could "rely" on. The consultants would spend hours on problems that didn’t seem too bad at first, but quickly would turn into multiple problems and result in astronomical service bills. The excuses followed quickly, and lawyers hired to word service contracts with language that even they could not understand, wove the loopholes.

The result was an industry that quickly became mysterious and in many cases ill-trusted. People who carried their sick computers to a person or business who "claimed" to be "qualified", would often stand and shake as they handed it over to be operated on. People whose networks went down and didn’t have anyone to call, would sweat and swear and panic.