Microsoft for the first time has said it will pay a financial penalty if it doesn't reach its service-level goals for a technical support product.

A new service called Premier Mission Critical Support is now available, to which Microsoft has attached a 30-minute response-time guarantee, said Bryan Belmont, general manager of Microsoft Services' support and health division.

If a customer reports a problem, Microsoft will have to respond within 30 minutes to report it is working on the problem. If it doesn't, Microsoft has to pay a fine to the customer, he said.

Microsoft works out the fine amount on a customer-by-customer basis and factors in how many times Microsoft fails to meet the time requirement, Belmont said. The fines increase the more Microsoft misses its target, he added.

The time element is key to Premier Mission Critical Support, which Microsoft designed based on customer feedback to provide support for applications such as stock-trading, reservation or billing systems that need to be available all the time, Belmont said.

These applications "can't afford to go down, and when they do go down [customers want] us to help them bring them back up," he said.

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