1. You didn’t give a dime to this company. You weren’t a customer and acting like you might – sometime in the future, maybe – spend money on their product doesn’t pay their bills.

2. You criticized their business model without understanding it. The software is open source. They follow the same business model as myriad other successful companies that provide support for open source software.

3. You approached them in a very condescending way with an attitude that reeks of entitlement. Oh, and arrogance. I don’t know how many “blog views” or “hits” you get, but the fact that no one commented on this post for over a year and a half makes me hope that no one else cares about your opinion of this company. And the fact that you would, “never insult [your] users with the type of email [he] sent [you],” doesn’t erase your insulting email to a company that gave you a year of free product.

Overall, giving unsolicited advice as a thinly veiled rant against a company that did nothing wrong to you is a bad business model. I did sample some of your other posts, and while I wouldn’t say they sucked, I wouldn’t put your blog in the same category as other blogs that I whole-heartedly endorse.

That sounds good in theory, but doesn’t make sense to any consumer, especially when compatibility and performance upgrades are bundled into the word “support”. To a real person those “upgrades” and “support” are simply “the thing that I bought, working the way it’s supposed to”.

Since you can’t get CrossOver without the support, and the thing that you add to your cart isn’t called “CrossOver Mac Support” it’s called “CrossOver Mac”, I’d say that they’re selling you a product and just giving crappy service.

The problem with the “Support as Product” model is that it transforms situations which would normally be an opportunity to provide remarkable service and create fans of your company and product into a opportunity for disappointment. While the business model may not be new, I’d agree with Adrian3 that it’s a “bad” business model; not because they can’t make money, but because there’s not opportunity to be “amazing”. At most CrossOver provides software that works, that’s it.

Regardless, customer service isn’t about what you charge or where you bury your R&D and support costs — it’s about treating your customer like a valuable partner, or at least a fragile asset. To me the argument against Crossover isn’t pricing, it’s defensive, petty shots at someone with a concern about giving a company some money.

Be nice to people you need, and we all need happy customers.

He makes it pretty clear that you paying for support not upgrades but you don’t seem to acknowledge that. It’s a rate bit of software that doesn’t have issues. Testing for every eventually is nigh on impossible. Having the developer at hand to help fix individual issues sounds great and $35 a year sounds good to me, especially when they throw in special offers especially as you will end up paying that for 37 months. Less than a dollar a month is pretty good.

Personally I’d have just asked whether I could have had any discount voucher and eased up on the whole consequences thing.