Mike:
Good to see you can post comments... I thought you had no access whatsoever to Wordpress.

Now regarding:
(quote)that there’s a new start up out there that will have “experts” on the payrole to answer all kinds of questions(/quote)

In my personal experience a paid service of any sorts that competes with free stuff has to be MUCH better than what's free, and that, usually is not the case.
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David:
For once "troubleshooters" or "wizards" are great as a first resort. I allways try to solve any issues starting whith whatever info or docs I have sitting in my pc.

Of course for the "I can't find the power button" sort of user forums will be of no use, but even phone support is of little use to them in many cases.

Remote support, as you describe it is a nice alternative, but it has some disadvantages I can think about. For once it's of little use to the end user besides solving the immediate matter, eg. it'll solve the issue this time, but next time it pops up... they'll have to seek the same exact support and so on (the famous "don't give me a fish, but rather teach me how to catch them")

Yahoo answers is another proof that the concept somehow works. of course you get a lot of riff-raff in Y! like "I don't like your question" or other sort of useless compulsory posting. The word "moderatoion" comes to mind.

Once again I think the concept could be usefull not only for open source but for any company that applies it in a smart fashion.
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Jim:
Nice to hear you are a "community" fan as well, I used to moderate and own a lot of forums, yahoo lists and stuff, but I have delegated most of them. I still moderate a pretty big Terragen Yahoo list (6000+ usrs) which is great fun, although the lack of news about a future release date has made things a tad hard on us latey.

Finally thanks for the nice comment on the blog, much appreciated!! Whenever you want me to write for "da Madman" I'd be honoured to!

Totally agree with the idea that a company can mine ideas out of communities to fix or improve products. Also, companies can 'leak' info on those sites to see what the feedback would be. I seriously believe Apple does this all the time to see what features in ipods etc a consumer would want.

As for communities, I use them pretty extensively in regards to query logic, web analytics, and javascript (when I don't pester you). The Wisdom of Crowds always has the write answer.

btw - you are doing a phenomenal job with this blog. and makes me wonder how you have the time. feel free to start writing for my blog, it needs a new editor. :)

Peer to peer support works well in opensource environments (I speak from experience of supporting my Wordpress installation from the Wordpress.org knowledge base), but those communities are typically more sophisticated than the average consumer, vsb audience, which oftentimes has difficulties enunciating the problem they are wrestling with. Hence the rise of "troubleshooter" wizards in mainstream systems such as Windows.

The biggest advance, IMHO, is remote service control where the service rep "takes over" the remote PC and diagnoses it rapidly, without waiting for the customer to translate verbal instructions into actions.

I also think the rise of apps such as Yahoo Answers offers some hope for peer based support.

Esteban... I don't use forums or online communities much (other than blogs), but I have found one while in China to be very helpful (www.thatsbj.com). It's great to post a question or a request and get many responses, mostly with good info.

I read somewhere last week, that there's a new start up out there that will have "experts" on the payrole to answer all kinds of questions (from complex problems to simple). This will be fee-based.

I think we will start to see the "really good advice or answers" become protected content, and must pay to access.