Maintenance

The Maintenance state consists of meeting the long-term needs of customers who have chosen our product. They may need assistance in using the product, so we provide customer support through all appropriate means. The product may require periodic updates or unscheduled repairs. Concerns include:

• What are the demographics of the installed base?
• Do our customers seek a next-generation product, or are they satisfied with current capabilities?
• What is the Mean Time Between Failures (MBTF)?
• Can we derive substantial revenue from service contracts?
• Are existing customers the primary market for our newer products?

In our model, there is a 0.3 probability each quarter that a project will move from the Maintenance state to the Obsolescence state. There is a 0.2 probability that the project will move from the Maintenance state back to the Production state. There is a 0.5 probability that the project will remain in the Maintenance state. This indicates a pronounced tendency for questionable decisions to enter Maintenance, since ideally there would be no transitions from Maintenance back to Production. Our model does not reflect a possibility that a project may be permanently abandoned in the Maintenance stage. We provide our customers with a reasonable lead time before dropping support.

If the Coupling From The Past algorithm results in the Maintenance state, this means that the Maintenance state always occurred at time t=0, regardless of what states occurred at any time in the past.