Microsoft

Microsoft Answers Forum To Offer Paid Support – TechSupport Marketplace

December 18, 2009

Microsoft has started a new pilot program on their Microsoft Answers forum whereby users will be allowed to pay for tech support. The way it is intended to work is that users can ask questions on the new website and a select group of technical experts will be able to bid and provide support. The program is currently available only on the English forum. The service is currently named – TechSupport Marketplace and chances are it’ll be re-named.

According to Microsoft:

TechSupport Marketplace is a website developed and hosted by Microsoft. It brings together Customers who are having a problem and independent Experts with the skills and ability to troubleshoot and help resolve those problems. In return for helping Customers with their computer problems in a one on one manner, the Experts earn some money directly from the Customer they are helping.

Why is Microsoft hosting this site?

Microsoft is offering this site as a service for both Customers and Experts. By helping to bring down the cost of support dramatically, Microsoft hopes that Customers will get even small problems fixed. This should make owning and using computers a more enjoyable and rewarding experience.

In order to lower support costs, Microsoft does not charge Experts any money either. This reduces their overhead, which translates into lower costs to Customers. In addition, Microsoft makes available tools to help with the troubleshooting process which should help reduce the time coming to a solution to the problem.

Something like Experts-Exchange? Never liked that site to be honest and this might have a negative impact on the community aspect that Tyler Welch (PM – MS Answers) talked about in our latest .

Update: Microsoft will not be taking any of the share of the money and all of it will go to the expert, minus Paypal’s processing fee since it’ll be the payment gateway.

Update #2: Mary Jo Foley has some more program specifics courtesy a spokesperson at Microsoft.

You may also like

Entry-level Gaming Desktop: 12 Things I Learned Buying the HP Pavilion

Surface Pro 2017: Work in Progress Validation of Microsoft’s Vision

The Microsoft Band Will Eventually Be Disbanded

Microsoft Band: The Polished Prototype

3 Things Cortana Can Do Better

Xbox LIVE Gold: A Waste of Money

25 comments
  • Joe Blough has written:

    Don’t you think it would have been useful to actually post a URL for this “TechSupport Marketplace” website?

    I’m seeing a few dozen search hits for this TechSupport Marketplace, but none of them are showing a URL for it.

    ???

    • manan has written:

      I would’ve if I had it. This is all the news I have at the moment. The link to the new forum is being given to the guys who’re participating in the pilot program, I unfortunately am not a part of it as of now. The screen shots I have are also horribly low res so didn’t share them either, make no sense.

  • Joe Blough has written:

    Do you know anything about Microsoft winding down it’s usenet server? It’s the server that’s hosting the microsoft.public set of support groups. Microsoft has not yet created a windows-7 newsgroup, and it appears that it won’t.

  • Joe Blough has written:

    Do you know the exact full-name for this Windows 7 news group?

    And is it a real usenet group, or just a web-forum group?

  • Joe Blough has written:

    Perhaps I’m not being clear.

    Microsoft created a set of *usenet* newsgroups many years ago (10 – 15) and they operate an NNTP server and a web-interface to those groups. What Microsoft has conspicuously NOT done is add a set of windows-7 groups to that hierarchy.

    What-ever Microsoft wants to create as a support forum to be run by their MVP’s, it can’t be done with newsgroups and be private or anonymous (as usenet is).

  • Frank has written:

    Hi Manan,

    This is off topic but you have a little problem at your website, it shows the error:Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/beingman/public_html/wp/wp-content/plugins/topsy/topsy.php on line 966 on top of it…(besides that i really like your site)

    Best regards

    Frank

    • manan has written:

      Hi Frank, thanks for dropping by :) yes, the error started appearing ever since I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, I’m still trying to find out what’s causing the problem by disabling the plugins one by one.

      And thank you for the appreciation :)

  • Ashish Bajaj has written:

    Error on the header of your page.

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/beingman/public_html/wp/wp-content/plugins/topsy/topsy.php on line 966

    Please get it corrected.

    • manan has written:

      thank you for the update, I thought it was fixed. The error is due a plugin, which is not topsy. So I’m waiting for updates and trying to troubleshoot the error.

  • Microsoft Support Forum has written:

    Initially, people who visit the Windows XP and Windows Vista forums “Ask a Question” page on Microsoft Answers may be invited to participate. The pilot is obviously limited in scale and Experts who help the customers have been selected by Microsoft especially for this pilot.

  • Adil Abbas has written:

    i think this actually is a good decision that experts are to give answers because i will help solving the issues more easily as well as quickly and also presence of experts will going to to help in keeping the forums clean by preventing same questions being posted again and again and many times un-answered!

    – Adil

    (sorry for my bad english)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *