Microsoft makes ~16 billion $ a quarter in profit, of which they return ~10 billion $ to their investors.

They could go and spend 200 million a quarter on decent customer support without making too much of a dent in their financial line.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2023-q2...

$200M is approximately $0.15/user. How much support do you expect to get for that?

How many of these 1 billion users actually need support? Only a tiny fraction.

Uh... what? If there was a free number you could call to get competent technical support, people would spend their entire day on the phone with it instead of reading documentation or hiring IT staff.

Not just high friction, but a formal verification like certification would be interesting.

Nah, you don't want bureaucratic gatekeeping. You want the 14 year old in Kenya or Ukraine with technical competence but no ID to be able to report the bug he finds.

The point is to exclude people who don't know what they're talking about, not people who can't pay registration fees or produce documents.

Delegating first-level bug triage to the community can also work as long as your company is well liked enough to motivate volunteers. For that you just need a public bug tracker that everyone can post to but only allow regular users (e.g. those who have made useful bug reports before) to confirm something is a not yet known bug and forward it to your developers. This way once you do get notified of a real bug you will have access to not just that one report but also potential duplicates that might provide interesting information - which might have never been filed if the first level was too high friction.