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: 
Yes it has. If you have made an effort to solve the problem yourself, you have to get to at least the third person before you get anybody who will understand the issue, and maybe the fourth person can help.

Once you get to that person, though -- I've found the support to be unbelievably good with a lot of followup and I even had an MS support person help me solve a complex ASP.NET deployment issue with one of our customers.
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.