Need help from Yahoo? It could cost you: "The struggling online media company is testing a plan to charge customers $1.99 a minute for phone support, a company representative said Tuesday. Yahoo has been testing the fees for about two weeks with customers who use its free e-mail service, the representative said."

As an historical side note, support was most often bundled with software 10 years ago, when all you could buy was shrink-wrap packages. When Lotus and Microsoft introduced their volume licensing contracts (Passport and Select respectively), they soon started to remove all but the most basic support from the products themselves, and switched to a paying, à la carte model instead.

Link sent by Gary Price.

04/11/02 update: Australia escapes Yahoo charges, for now. Yahoo's international roll-outs of paying programs seem most often done on a case by case basis. For instance, auctions are still free in France.