Imagine you are called by a Microsoft recruiter for a phone interview. You setup a date and time and then you get on the phone with me. I explain all about WER Services and then ask this key question: "if you were the owner of WER Services for ISV (Independent Software Developers)  how would you explain the benefits of your feature to a big software vendor <insert favorite name here>?"

Last year as our team was expending I used this question in literally dozens of phone calls and in-person interviews. The reason I did that was the incredible emphasis we put on helping our software development partners improve their products and on spreading the word about the value of what we do.

Looking at all the great answers I got I was able to boil them down to several areas:

Top line benefits for developers

Companies using WER Services can see increases in sales due to the following benefits:

• Software is known to be more reliable - using WER Services allows companies to fix bugs early and review \ expose reliability data. Having a solid product and ways to demonstrate that to customers can contribute to sales and to competitive positioning.
• Customers will know vendors are attentive when they encounter problems - companies can react to the crash experience by using the Responses feature of WER Services. Responses can include fixes, support steps and even customer questioners. Responses improve customer perception as they provide them with an actionable recourse after a bad experience occurs.

Bottom line benefits for developers

Companies using WER Services can reduce the cost of producing and maintaining their products by:

• Reducing customer support costs - companies can reduce the number of expensive support calls coming in by using WER Services to identify and fix top issues. They can use WER Services reports to identify and debug the issues that have the most impact on customers. They can then distribute fixes for those issues through Responses after a problem occurs.
• Fixing bugs during the beta cycle - companies can reduce the length and increase the quality of a product beta cycle by using WER Services to collect crash dumps for pre-release versions and fixing issues before the product hits wide range distribution. This eliminates eventual support calls as well as improve the out of the gate quality.

Next post would be the next question I used to ask folks: "how would you know a company is successful using WER Services?"

BTW, Happy 2009 everyone!

Nir Mashkowski

Lead Program Manager, WER Services