I have failed you Joel Spolsky
I want to start with a formal apology to one of my favorite authors Joel Spolsky. Recently I overheard the system administrator at my company speaking with a remote employee, debugging simple windows problems. After I heard him finish his half an hour call, I decided to send him a link to Copilot, and told him a little bit about it. After he checked it out, he decided that he could not justify the costs. For anyone who has never used it, or did not click on the link, Copilot costs virtually nothing. For a full 24 hours of use, the terrible cost is $5. However, if this is too overcoming of a price, you can subscribe to a pay as your go plan for a whopping price of $0.25 per minute, aka $15 an hour. Even better, for the full time user, $19.95 a month would allow you unlimited use every month.
Let’s crunch the numbers for a minute. Let’s assume we sign up and use the “most” expensive plan, which I think is the pay as you go plan. We will use the worst case scenario. Let’s assume that copilot saves the sysadmin a total of 30 minutes on his next 1 hour call. This means he spent 30 minutes on copilot costing the company $7.50, and he saves 30 minutes. If you think that it is outrageous to assume that a person could turn a 60 minute tech support call to a 30 minute tech support call, then you have never had your girlfriend call you at ten o’clock at night because all of her pictures are gone forever, and she doesn’t know where to find them because link to the folder on her desktop was accidentally deleted. Back to the topic. To be able to justify this immense $7.50 cost, to only save 30 minutes, the sysadmin would have to be making less than $15 an hour! FIFTEEN DOLLARS AN HOUR!
Update: Joel you would be proud. I may have finally convinced him. The long dissertation on how frustrating it is to have a sysadmin who constantly fights change and new technologies will have to wait for another time. Most likely soon.
Tags: copilot, Joel Spolsky, sysadmin