Using your community as a technical support resource may be a tool for good...Or eeeeeeeevil. Sure, their are plenty of healthy examples of vendors who have learned how to support their community as an adjunct to their regular support. Have a question? Post it on the forums, and someone, either from the community or the company, will answer.
That's not a new phenomenon. It's at least as old as the Microsoft forums, or the Oracle Technology Network, or the countless discussion forums that smaller companies use to augment their support capabilities. (Which makes me wonder why people are re-discovering this phenomenon, but that's a whole other discussion.)
Since community support is nothing new, we've seen cases where it has worked, and where it hasn't. Vendors who see good customer service as important will invest in their community to improve the customer experience that much more. Vendors who don't care about customer service might create a community, with the (ridiculous) expectation that it will replace their own customer support.
There must be a minor form of PTSD that horrible customer service can create, because all of us, at one time or another, have flashed back to the moment when customer service turned into an oxymoron. I have recurrent flashbacks to the time, several years ago, when I bought a Gateway computer with a faulty CD drive. Gateway purchased a bad batch of these drives, installed them in their computers, and instead of admitting to the mistake, kept sending them as replacements for identical drives until the supply ran out.
But that wasn't the worse part of it. Gateway compounded the problem with its, er, ground-breaking strategy for tech support. Rather than leaving you on hold until a representative was available, you broke into the call with the rep when you were the second or third person in line. Of course, that meant you had to sit through the conversation the rep had with the people in front of you in the queue.
Why? As one rep explained it to me, they were making it possible for other customers to help each other--presumably because the support person didn't have the answers? Or maybe you could just commiserate with other users about their problems, or feel lucky that your CD drive issue wasn't nearly as painful as the guy with the catastrophic hard disk failure.
Gateway may have had a remarkably silly take on community support (and I haven't even told you about holding the phone next to my PC!), but it was hardly unique in the chronicle of bad uses for your community. Forums where customers wonder aloud if any company representative ever reads posts. Fake customer accounts for posting positive things about the vendor. Threads deleted because the company felt embarrassed by the problems being discussed.
Maybe a few mediocre companies have a road to Damascus moment when they learn, through the community, how their customers really feel about the quality of their products and support. The chances are pretty slim of a similar epiphany in a company that could give a flying fig about their quality of support.