Customer Support and Clouds

You know your business is becoming a commodity when your competitor differentiation becomes "better customer support." If you get to this point, you better be a significant marketshare player in your space otherwise the end is near. Decent customer support is very expensive, and therefore very few firms, in any space that I can think of off the top of my head, bother with it. Instead it becomes a race to the bottom. Consider utility companies, power, water, mobile service carriers, local hardline phone carriers, etc. Customer service for all of them is cast to lowest common denominator.

I'm seeing Cloud computing services start to differentiate on customer service; whoops. It'll be a matter of a few years before that game's over. SLAs are one thing, but customer service is another. Focus on tangible, contractual, SLAs, not "better customer service."