Question: I saw this quote in [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/221716/most-large-companies-prefer-wisa-over-lamp-why):

> 
> MS support is poor, except when you've
>  paid for a support contract... then
>  its very very good. – gbjbaanb 
> 
> 
> 

This got me thinking. My company has had 2 support incidents with Microsoft a few months ago (before Stack Overflow was live). In both cases, we were pushing the limits of the SharePoint system we were building, and the API did not expose events to let us know when operations were completed. Both times, Microsoft's response was to tell us to add a `Thread.Sleep()` call and just wait for the operation to finish.

Now, I am all for the community working together to answer questions, but sometimes there just aren't answers to your question available online.

For the times when you can't find an answer, has paid support been worth it to you?

If you have had success with Microsoft paid support, please share what type of problem it was. I am trying to understand exactly what to expect from a support incident.

Answer: 
I too have had a good experience, but as with some of the others I will say that you have to escalate the issue typically to get resolution. Once you do though, they follow-through very well, and provided detailed assistance.
I've only had one experience with Microsoft support, and in that instance I found it to be lacking. After a few hours on the phone they concluded that there was no way to solve my problem (unable to modify any website settings in IIS) and we would have to reinstall everything. I later found a way to fix it myself without going through all of that by manually editing a file. This was about 8 years or so ago though, I haven't had to deal with them since then.