I wish that Corel had technical support for WinDVD.

[BvN]

My conclusions are based my experiences, on rummaging the Web, in general, and on the postings on this web-board. There is a lot of unnecessary frustration in user land. I know that software cost-of-goods-sold is dominated by after-sales support costs.
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I've been active in the software products industry for over 30 years. I have been on development teams, sales & marketing teams, and on customer support teams. I tech-rep'd for over 10 years and I love to code. So, I think I have enough street cred's to offer some advice.
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You do have sales, marketing, and 1st level customer support, which are OK, as is. You need an effective, low cost methods for dealing with 2nd and 3rd level problems.
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--- Corel needs to avoid technical problems before they happen.
Encourage users to add working configurations and operations to your web board. Target these to the technology astute audience. The web-board user community can help the newbies ramp up. Having a library of known-to-be-good configurations allows purchasers to emulate the tried and true and avoid being the pioneer with the arrows in his/her back. Corel should also publish some target configurations and architectural goals, for which the product was designed. This would allow astute users to determine if the product is a good fit.
--- Corel should consolidate the instances of technical problems it chooses to investigate (support). One-on-one support is costly and highly repetitive. Corel should also identify those issues it will not investigate, so that we can adapt and move on. I recommend that Corel identify those problems with a tracking number on the web-board. The user community can often supply additional symptom and diagnostic information that might be overlooked by the development / maintenance team. There is no compelling need for Corel to be actively posting on these threads, unless there is a general request for more data. Solutions, work-arounds, and features/bugs can be added to FAQ lists with the web-board as a detail backup.
--- 1st level customer support should identify those situations which are outside their scope and recommend that the user enroll in the web-board along with an appropriate tracking number (if available).
--- Drop 2nd level one-on-one telephone service. Let the user qualify him or herself as to what level of support is needed ¡V best done on a web-board. Most of the problems I've read about, require more information than is convenient to a hot line. One-on-one telephone service should be reserved as a fall back to the web-board and used sparingly when it meets both Corel's and the user's needs.
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These are brief examples of my use of WinDVD which will demonstrate the inadequacy of the current ¡§system¡¨ definition in the "profile". Pretty much all of the following detail is well outside the scope of any reasonable Corel service offering. On the other hand, a detailed HOWTO might sell a few more copies and help users avoid related technical issues.
--- I have 7 hosts and a LAN that support my use of WinDVD.
1@ HTPC, pretty much dedicated to running WinDVD. Win-Rip and Photo-base are the only other applications (Windows XP/SP2).
3@ ATI MMC headless DVR's that provide most of what WinDVD plays (Windows XP/SP2).
1@ Fedora house server that houses the music and photographic libraries as well as turning the DVR's on.
1@ Fedora file server for collecting and housing the MPEG-2 files generated by the DVR's.
1@ personal host (Fedora) for managing the DVR's.
--- I have a dedicated facility for using WinDVD.
A 400 sq. ft. automated home theater, a 50 sq. ft. wiring closet, a 96¡¨ screen, a 19¡¨ LCD display on a wall mounted peerless articulated arm for controlling Windows and things, an SK-7100 Airboard keyboard / mouse, and a commercial DTS Neo:6 compliant sound system with 17 servo amplifiers and a EIA 116dB ¡§far¡¨ sound field. This $30,000 plus environment is integrated by WinDVD and is probably far from typical of your target audience. However, a lot of my problems are encountered in more modest circumstances ¡V according to the Web posts I have browsed.

My use of WinDVD and what I consider to be ¡§bugs¡¨ cannot be understood outside of it's operating environment and configuration. All of my ¡§problems¡¨ arise from my particular use. If someone else had a similar and successful deployment, I would have had no technical problems. Corel's cost-of-goods-sold would have been less and I would be a more satisfied customer.