> How much are these customers paying for support to have Raymond Chen on first level support to debug their batch files?
Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?
Or maybe he was on a project working directly with the client already, so this was just part of whatever he was working on.
The post doesn’t mention a year. Early Microsoft Windows was very badly documented and the docs were difficult to search, so it wouldn't surprise me that it took senior level support to know that fact.
i envy the folks who can actually make sense of msdn docs. they were tedious and overwhelming decades before ai made that the premiere style this year.
some parts are better than others, but god is it a quest to find anything in there.
And there weren't tools like process monitor that showed way more about the state of what was running
It’s the same for 2026
Yeah but we got AI now. Ask codex to get rid of McAfee for you.
> Or rather, maybe, how bad are the initial support levels that couldn't figure out basic functionality like this and it was escalated to Chen?
On something like Unix, I suspect this would be easy to figure out since programs typically dump diagnostic information to the terminal. On Windows, this would likely be thing learned through prior experience (especially since it would depend upon the program being launched).
He said that the program displayed an error message on the command line. That's diagnostic information dumped to the terminal.