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Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer servi

Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service and inability to contact them. Any other company would suffer massive consequences with customer service that poor. What will it take for them to turn this around? Maybe they believe they are too big for this to matter?

pdonis 7y ago
> they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.
- zaksoup 7y ago
  I'm not sure why there are downvotes on this comment. It's pretty clear this is the case - what Google Products have dedicated account executives that give you their phone number? Ads and Cloud. The two direct-buy relationships you can have with Google. Even G Suite doesn't merit dedicated CSMs until you're fortune 100...
- kevinyew 7y ago
  Except they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases, so this doesn't make any sense. Why would they bother running the Play Store at all if it didn't make them money?
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google. Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.
  - zwily 7y ago
    They know that whatever algorithm is used here will fire off some false positives. They also believe that paying people to review in order to correct the false positives is not worth it.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Obviously, they get a cut of App Store revenue. Android is worth many billions of dollars to Google, and having quality apps on the store is an essential part of the ecosystem. To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less. The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube. IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > this will eventually cost them billions of dollars It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money. > their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
  - mavelikara 7y ago
    > this will eventually cost them billions of dollars It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
    - bsder 7y ago
      > It does - in Google Cloud. More than that, I suspect. I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower. I imagine I am not alone.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  I once made the mistake of renting a movie from Google Play Movies. I am a customer. The "my purchases" page just shows an error, so I can't find the titles I own or have rented. There is no place to report this except in a user to user forum.
- redwall_hp 7y ago
  If you pay for an app, you are a Google Play customer. They are acting as a retailer, purchasing software from a vendor and distributing it to you as a markup. The developer of the software is the "third party" in the transaction.
jbarham 7y ago
If you're a Google Ads buyer, Google is easy to contact. If you're a mere Google products user, good luck getting help via their crowdsourced message boards...
- manigandham 7y ago
  Even with Google ads, there are plenty of 7-figure spenders who have trouble reaching customer service.
  - jbarham 7y ago
    Hmm, at least where I am in Australia the Google Ads 1800 number is listed three times before I even login: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_AU/home/ https://ads.google.com/intl/en_AU/home/
    - manigandham 7y ago
      That's for reaching a basic customer support line that'll do little more than tell you where to put in your credit card info. If you need serious help, especially with account problems, you better know someone inside.
  - erklik 7y ago
    I have called their 1800 number and they have been fairly helpful. Maybe I am just lucky.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  What kind of google people are you contacting though? From what I have heard its very easy to contact someone who will help you set up your ads account to spend money but I imagine its a lot harder to find someone who can do anymore than show you how to use the product.
gwbas1c 7y ago
Class action lawsuit
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ? It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition. Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.
  - doodliego 7y ago
    Get 100 developers and small companies with similar stories and it should be easy to convince a jury that Google arbitrarily, without cause or review, destroyed these people's livelihoods and should be held liable and accountable. EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ? The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    The plaintiffs just have to prove harm. Based on the article, this looks very easy to do.
HenryBemis 7y ago
Some people wrote below but I didn't see the key words that came to my mind. You are not Google's customer. You are Google's product. The customers are the ad/tracking networks. Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up. We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am afraid in majority of Google's end users, this is true.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  This is incorrect. I have rented a movie from Google. I am their customer in every sense of the word. I cannot get customer service for my rental. Whether something is free or not has almost nothing to do with the service you get unless your account is in the tens of millions of dollars.
  - fourthark 7y ago
    It was probably worth more to them to know you watched it, than to rent it to you.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      You may be grossly overestimating ad prices. A datum is damn near worthless, but data in the aggregate is valuable because of the scale of these companies.
      - Shaddox 7y ago
        User tracking seems to be far more valuable than ads. I'm currently subcontracting for a specific large media trust. Ad contracts are in total about 6 figure numbers. User tracking, sponsored content and skins (custom stylesheets with a sponsor's branding and tracking) are very substantial 7 or 8 digit contracts. While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking. I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.
h1d 7y ago
Google thinks they're the smart bunch and the customers are there to serve them. It's just company attitude.
wutbrodo 7y ago
> Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! Their market cap is about 800 billion...I don't think 3 trillion dollar companies exist yet
- gesman 7y ago
  3/4 = 0.75 ~$750-800B

pdonis 7y ago

> they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.

zaksoup 7y ago
I'm not sure why there are downvotes on this comment. It's pretty clear this is the case - what Google Products have dedicated account executives that give you their phone number? Ads and Cloud. The two direct-buy relationships you can have with Google. Even G Suite doesn't merit dedicated CSMs until you're fortune 100...
kevinyew 7y ago
Except they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases, so this doesn't make any sense. Why would they bother running the Play Store at all if it didn't make them money?
- pdonis 7y ago
  > they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google. Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.
- zwily 7y ago
  They know that whatever algorithm is used here will fire off some false positives. They also believe that paying people to review in order to correct the false positives is not worth it.
zaroth 7y ago
Obviously, they get a cut of App Store revenue. Android is worth many billions of dollars to Google, and having quality apps on the store is an essential part of the ecosystem. To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less. The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube. IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > this will eventually cost them billions of dollars It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money. > their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
- mavelikara 7y ago
  > this will eventually cost them billions of dollars It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > It does - in Google Cloud. More than that, I suspect. I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower. I imagine I am not alone.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
I once made the mistake of renting a movie from Google Play Movies. I am a customer. The "my purchases" page just shows an error, so I can't find the titles I own or have rented. There is no place to report this except in a user to user forum.
redwall_hp 7y ago
If you pay for an app, you are a Google Play customer. They are acting as a retailer, purchasing software from a vendor and distributing it to you as a markup. The developer of the software is the "third party" in the transaction.

jbarham 7y ago

If you're a Google Ads buyer, Google is easy to contact. If you're a mere Google products user, good luck getting help via their crowdsourced message boards...

manigandham 7y ago
Even with Google ads, there are plenty of 7-figure spenders who have trouble reaching customer service.
- jbarham 7y ago
  Hmm, at least where I am in Australia the Google Ads 1800 number is listed three times before I even login: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_AU/home/ https://ads.google.com/intl/en_AU/home/
  - manigandham 7y ago
    That's for reaching a basic customer support line that'll do little more than tell you where to put in your credit card info. If you need serious help, especially with account problems, you better know someone inside.
- erklik 7y ago
  I have called their 1800 number and they have been fairly helpful. Maybe I am just lucky.
baroffoos 7y ago
What kind of google people are you contacting though? From what I have heard its very easy to contact someone who will help you set up your ads account to spend money but I imagine its a lot harder to find someone who can do anymore than show you how to use the product.

gwbas1c 7y ago

Class action lawsuit

peterwwillis 7y ago
In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ? It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition. Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.
- doodliego 7y ago
  Get 100 developers and small companies with similar stories and it should be easy to convince a jury that Google arbitrarily, without cause or review, destroyed these people's livelihoods and should be held liable and accountable. EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ? The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  The plaintiffs just have to prove harm. Based on the article, this looks very easy to do.

HenryBemis 7y ago

Some people wrote below but I didn't see the key words that came to my mind. You are not Google's customer. You are Google's product. The customers are the ad/tracking networks. Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up. We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am afraid in majority of Google's end users, this is true.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
This is incorrect. I have rented a movie from Google. I am their customer in every sense of the word. I cannot get customer service for my rental. Whether something is free or not has almost nothing to do with the service you get unless your account is in the tens of millions of dollars.
- fourthark 7y ago
  It was probably worth more to them to know you watched it, than to rent it to you.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    You may be grossly overestimating ad prices. A datum is damn near worthless, but data in the aggregate is valuable because of the scale of these companies.
    - Shaddox 7y ago
      User tracking seems to be far more valuable than ads. I'm currently subcontracting for a specific large media trust. Ad contracts are in total about 6 figure numbers. User tracking, sponsored content and skins (custom stylesheets with a sponsor's branding and tracking) are very substantial 7 or 8 digit contracts. While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking. I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.

h1d 7y ago

Google thinks they're the smart bunch and the customers are there to serve them. It's just company attitude.

wutbrodo 7y ago

> Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! Their market cap is about 800 billion...I don't think 3 trillion dollar companies exist yet

gesman 7y ago
3/4 = 0.75 ~$750-800B