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Wow, that's enraging and really bad, even for a company as... unique in its approach to customer support as Google. I really hope someone on Drive is reading t

Wow, that's enraging and really bad, even for a company as... unique in its approach to customer support as Google. I really hope someone on Drive is reading this and can escalate, but it's really bad that it takes a highly voted post on Hacker News to get some kind of resolution. Even "it's too expensive to fix this, here are your files and a refund from when it started breaking" would be infinitely better than this.

ProAm 9y ago
Automated support heard your complaint, automated support don't care.
nikanj 9y ago
The modern, scaled-up, cost-effective way of doing support seems to be: 1) Tell them to restart their PC. 2) Tell them to restart their PC again. 3) Hope they go away, as the amount of revenue they bring simply isn't worth the engineering hours. In your behemoth organization, having an engineer look at a ticket costs around $18000 in internal billing. 4) Wait. Tell them to reinstall the software, and restart their PC. 5) Offer to refund their money. Hope they take the hint, and go away. 6) Wait. 7) Close the ticket with a vague excuse, such as "Missing contact details", or "We've released a new .version since this was opened." If, and only if, the customer manages to write a blog post funny enough to reach the front page of Reddit/HN/Whatnot, the ticket will be seen by someone in the development organization, not the support organization. After this, things start to happen. Possibly even someone from VP-level promises to fix bad communication between the support organization, and the development one. They proceed to fix this bad communication by terminating communication completely.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I'm curious to see about the outcome this time. Usually in such cases the people working for a high-profile company feel embarrassed and intervene personally, the OP thanks them for solving the problem and the case is closed. But this time the level of embarrassment might be too high, and Google folks frequenting HN seem to be mostly programmers. They might just want to keep a low profile for now - tomorrow this post will be forgotten, and the guy will write another post "It's been 192 days..." - just like he's been writing so far and nobody cared.

ProAm 9y ago

Automated support heard your complaint, automated support don't care.

nikanj 9y ago

The modern, scaled-up, cost-effective way of doing support seems to be: 1) Tell them to restart their PC. 2) Tell them to restart their PC again. 3) Hope they go away, as the amount of revenue they bring simply isn't worth the engineering hours. In your behemoth organization, having an engineer look at a ticket costs around $18000 in internal billing. 4) Wait. Tell them to reinstall the software, and restart their PC. 5) Offer to refund their money. Hope they take the hint, and go away. 6) Wait. 7) Close the ticket with a vague excuse, such as "Missing contact details", or "We've released a new .version since this was opened." If, and only if, the customer manages to write a blog post funny enough to reach the front page of Reddit/HN/Whatnot, the ticket will be seen by someone in the development organization, not the support organization. After this, things start to happen. Possibly even someone from VP-level promises to fix bad communication between the support organization, and the development one. They proceed to fix this bad communication by terminating communication completely.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

I'm curious to see about the outcome this time. Usually in such cases the people working for a high-profile company feel embarrassed and intervene personally, the OP thanks them for solving the problem and the case is closed. But this time the level of embarrassment might be too high, and Google folks frequenting HN seem to be mostly programmers. They might just want to keep a low profile for now - tomorrow this post will be forgotten, and the guy will write another post "It's been 192 days..." - just like he's been writing so far and nobody cared.