| I've been a PBX engineer for over 10 years and these websites help people like myself in real world scenarios. There's only so much that books can tell you. When you get stuck in a situation where the book doesn't help, other engineer's real world experiences can help you out a lot.
Most of the people who use the sites are engineers. Technical people who have been trained on the systems and just need advice from other people who might've come across the same situation in their experience. True, there are some who are end users who have not technical training and are just trying to do things themselves to save money. But those people break it then it's their own fault. Nothing can replace training and experience.
As far as the vendors losing money goes, I don't think that's a problem. Manufacturers of systems ie Nortel, Avaya, NEC, Ericsson etc will always make money because they just sell the systems. They provide technical support only to those who have been properly trained. They do not waste their time answering questions from end users on how to set a call forward. As far as distributors go, they will always make money as they are always selling systems to resellers and providing support to trained engineers from the reseller. The also don't support end users. And as far as resellers go, they are always making money by selling systems to end users. If end users come to sites like this and find out how to do things then yes, the reseller could possibly not make as much money but that's their issue - they should password protect the system so that only they can get into it. Depending on what contract the end user has, they may have the legal right to have access to the system and if so then that's just the way it is. If it's clear that an untrained end user breaks their system and the reseller has to fix it then they are entitled to charge the end user for their time to fix it. |