Fingerhut said that Microsoft is not raising prices in response to protests from OEMs or retailers offering their own competing paid support services. "We weren't getting protests that we were undercutting them, though I was surprised we weren't," he said. Raising prices is "just the right thing to do."

He noted that customers with problems caused by bugs in the source code of the Microsoft software will get their money refunded.

Microsoft said in preparation for last week's Vista launch that "thousands of support engineers participated in training sessions ranging anywhere from a week to up to a month, and advanced training will start after release to further integrate our engineers' product and customer knowledge."

Fingerhut said his team's goal is to resolve problems on the first call. They are staffed up enough that even with the Vista launch, "to date there has been no waiting." Fingerhut said that the support team is made up of "Microsoft employees who oversee a large pool of support professionals, some of which is outsourced." He declined to comment on the percentage of customer support staffers that are full-time employees of Microsoft, or where they are located.