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Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only human beings at Google the user was able to get in touch with, via something like "Press 3 for Corporate Sales." Of course these poor Google corporate sales people had absolutely no way to help this user even if they wanted to. Google literally did not have any GMail account phone support (at least at the time). I could hear the poor guy screaming through their headsets about how he paid Google something for some service and was entitled to phone support and he demanded someone help him, but they just kept saying, "This is corporate sales. We do not offer consumer account support. If you want support, please visit the Google Support Forums at www dot..." After they hung up on him 3 or 4 times, eventually a manager got on the phone and told him (between his screams), "Look, you're not getting any phone support because it doesn't exist. There's nowhere for us to transfer you. There's nobody who can call you back about this. Your only option is to search the forums for an answer to your problem. I am going to terminate this call now. Sir, I'm going to terminate this call. No, we can't help you. Nobody at Google can help you. I am terminating this call now. We asked you to stop calling this number. Do not call us again. <click>" I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." That experience underscored that notion for me.

vbezhenar 5y ago
I submitted security bug to Chrome. It was not very serious or urgent. Somebody looked at it in the first hour, in the first day it was analyzed and in the first week it was resolved. I was kind of surprised, because I was sure that public feedback from nobody is going to be put in a very long queue.
eschulz 5y ago
Was the screaming guy no paying for some service?
- aesyondu 5y ago
  I'm a bit confused as well. > he paid Google something for some service and was entitled to phone support and he demanded someone help him This does not support the conclusion about free users being the product, since the customer was paying based on the statement above.
RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago
only tangentially related but that phrase is a pet peeve of mine. You are always the product if you are using software - free or paid. Netflix is sure as hell going to use your data the same way youtube would. The only exception of course is most but not all FOSS.
- Arshxd 5y ago
  - webXL 5y ago
    Looking at Apple's latest hardware changes, I think users are once again the customers.
- davidgh 5y ago
  I think there’s a difference. “You are the product” means that your usage and data are the primary thing the company develops (with software) so it can be sold to their actual customers, namely, advertisers. I’ve been involved with many software companies that gather various metrics (analytics, crash logs, user info, etc.) but do not sell that data to anyone. As such, the user is not “the product” but the customer. I think there’s a meaningful difference here.
  - zo1 5y ago
    In those cases the user is an asset for the company. And not "asset" in a good way if you ask me. It's more of an resource than anything noble.
- vgb2k18 5y ago
  Since it's a pet peeve we share I'll add... I feel it's a bi-directional exchange. A trade. I consume a product (Gmail) and they consume a product (my personal information). At best I'd be "a" product not exclusively "the" product.
- chaxor 5y ago
  Self hosted is the only good future
leoh 5y ago
You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  If it's about search, you could always use go/bad I think?
- judge2020 5y ago
  https://issuetracker.google.com/ https://issuetracker.google.com/ is supposed to be it, but if it were completely open and easy to use i'm sure they'd need a dedicated moderation team just for filtering the issues. The knowledge and dedication barrier is a frustrating but mostly effective way to weed out those with non-issues or issues that really don't affect them much (however humane you believe that is).
  - xg15 5y ago
    I mean yeah, then they should put up a dedicated moderation team to do so. It's not like they have not enough money to do so.
- igetspam 5y ago
  Did GUTS not survive? When I left, it was pretty solid. Some very close friends of mine spent years on that system. Haven't thought about it in a while but it was so simple and easy. Then again, that was a decade ago.
  - mike_d 5y ago
    GUTS is still used for things like desk moves, but buganizer is where eng tickets live. (at least when I left a few years ago)
- 5y ago
martyvis 5y ago
I've subscribed to Google One for a few years. (When I say "pay", I'm using credit from answering surveys from Google a few times a week). It's only a couple of dollars a month, it gives you more online cloud storage, but it also gives you a chat and call service to Google. I have used it a couple of times - once to help me push LG to release updates on a phone (they kept saying it was Google's responsibility), another to one get my wife properly added to be able to use the Home smart speaker. Both times chat was followed up a call to a real person (that was understandable, and willing to chase up and respond to the issue). I feel if I had an account issue it would similarly work out.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I think the issue is that the form is indeed locked behind being logged in[0], so the phone support won't work for login issues when you have no other device logged in. 0: https://support.google.com/googleone/contact/googleone_c2c?hl=en&utm_source=googleone_web https://support.google.com/googleone/contact/googleone_c2c?h...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- technofiend 5y ago
  I'm trying to use Google One now to fix an issue and it's been a struggle. Hopefully they'll eventually work it out but frankly without G1 I would probably just throw my Nest cameras out and dispute all future nest charges. Google really need to work on customer service if they're going to offer services that need it.
ngold 5y ago
Disclaimer. I'm a new Google play thing, by giving them money. Just registered a website through them and am about to release a game on the playstore. Fully dependant on zero custom service now. The one thing I've never understood about google. Some sort of law for a trillion dollar company to have customer service or something. Google should be employing 10's of thousands of customer service employees to take calls to troubleshoot their customers issues. On a side note. Here is my.... the simplest website you have seen since 1989. https://simplegametime.com https://simplegametime.com I'm not running a user data farm. I just want to make stupid games, like... P.S. Zero advertising for anything including my game. Just a 7 line privacy policy. Don't need much more.
- rzz3 5y ago
  More laws aren’t always the answer. Really, we should just be using a company that gives a shit about its users.
  - ngold 5y ago
    True. The sheer scale of not giving a crap is what is truly impressive. Alphabet has built a monster system meant solely to not have a phone number. That's a scary innovation.
    - darig 5y ago
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Problem is it all works just fine until you get locked out and have no options. So the market won't ever gradually move over because its only a very small % who get hit with an awful experience while everyone else is perfectly fine.
    - ngold 5y ago
      And now I'm signed up to the system. It's terrifying. At any point. You're done. Hence the nothing clause. I'm sure any game I submit to the play will be wrapped in googs analytics. No matter what my privacy police says.
joering2 5y ago
> "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." Xoogler here - actually we used to say "if you are not buying advertising from us, Google can't help you at all". And just recently I am great example of that. I used to have a Gsuite account at $6/per month for 3 years, then decided to give up on it b/c I wasn't using it. But unfortunately the domain expired before I could properly disconnect it and cancel my account. You can probably already imagine at this point what kind of hell I went thru with "google help". Ultimately I had someone from India called me 3 times to explain - the questionnaire they sent me has to be answer in specific format: each question has to have one paragraph space, then tab (9), then my answer. I kid you not! I spent 3 weeks, been transferred over email ticket about 10 times and every time they told me the same thing. Even if I did exactly how they want it - I guess email was automatically eating up the tabulate key and replacing it with spaces. Eventually a buddy of mine who still works there (different dept) told me customer support forwards your email to some account that parses message automatically, and they cannot even change one single letter in your message. Even when explaining them on the phone that I am following up with their stupid protocol of one new line, then tab, then my answer, then next line must be second question, their program must be messing it up. Eventually I gave up on their customer support. It took me/them six months of chargeback disputes for $6 each month until my account must have popped out on someones screen and Google employee gave me 3.5 seconds of their time to click "close this account".
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>about how he paid Google something for some service >I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." it seems even if he did pay he was the product, which frankly jibes with my experience of paying for things at Google.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  If you pay for it, you simply like it like this.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    As a normal rule I don't know what customer service is like at a company I'm paying for things at, until I have something go wrong and I realize it sucks.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product."" But it sounds like this "extremely irate user" was paying for it.
- steelframe 5y ago
  Yeah, fair point. It's been several years, so maybe my memory of all the details is a bit hazy by now. I just recall that at one point one of the salespeople was addressing a point about something or other involving the user having paid for something. I have no idea whether the user was telling the complete truth (were they referring to something they used to subscribe to and don't any more?) or whether at the time whatever they had paid Google for would have entitled the user to phone support for GMail account access issues. Whatever was going on, the user wasn't able to find any avenues to get the support they needed for their issue. Regardless I agree with other comments to the effect that even if you are paying, you are often still the product!
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    "Regardless I agree with other comments to the effect that even if you are paying, you are often still the product!" The anaylsis needs to go further than whether one is paying or not. IMHO. It is not rare to see HN commenters who appear to believe that the act of paying some "user fee" to a "tech" company that willfully caters to advertising, devotes almost all of its resources toward catering to advertisers, and derives almost all its revenue from advertising services, is somehow meaningful.
hericium 5y ago
> Google office there. The Googlers sitting around Seriously? You stated that you left the cult.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Even when you have paid Google products that come with support, it is really awful. They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. Just a simple clarification of something in their documentation. I was already under pressure to migrate to Office360, I stopped fighting after that. My employer is a huge AWS user and Google is constantly chasing us with a treasure chest of free credit to migrate over, their prices are significantly cheaper, but everyone agrees it’s worth the premium to stay with AWS simply because they answer the phone. (If you have never used AWS’s enterprise support, those guys are worth every penny.)
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. I find that extremely difficult to believe without more context. Google support isn’t that bad. I’ve had a mediocre-to-good experience with it over the years. With that said, while I agree that aws business and enterprise support is worth the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, so is the five bucks a month for a google workspace account that includes support.
  - kikimora 5y ago
    A few years back I wanted to call then but didn’t find a number. How do you contact Google’s support?
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      If you have a google workspace account and need google support, you can go in the admin console, help section in the top right, there is a contact form with phone and chat options.
      - afandian 5y ago
        What if you can't log in?
kodemager 5y ago
You’d wonder why they have corporate sales. I’ve worked in enterprise for a long time and we’d laugh at the notion whenever someone suggested we buy any Google service because easy access to phone support when things go wrong is one of the key selling points in enterprise. It’s why Microsoft has done so well for itself in this area over the decades. Sure Office helps, but the fact that your operations guys can be on the phone with their Seattle based offices, and get hourly updates where Microsoft calls you, when something big goes wrong is pure gold to any IT manager in any enterprise. Not only because it lets you solve issues faster, but also because you can tell the organisation that IT is on the phone with Microsoft’s head offices and you are working on a solution with them.
ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
It's pretty crazy to think about the fact that your email is de-facto your online identity, as it is the universal second factor that is used as a fallback if other login mechanisms fail. An email service is two things: a global name user@emailprovider.tld, which is really your online identity, and an email service that hosts the SMTP, IMAP and DNS services required for the identity to function. People are willing to hand over not just the ownership of the service but also their global digital identity (the email address) to a third-party which now assumes total control of it, and which does not have any interest in supporting you. It is a major hassle to move to another provider, even a paid one, because your email address is tied to the service provider. Because email addresses are practically a requirement to function in society, I think they should be a public service. Everyone should have the right to get an email address controlled by a public service institution which guarantees you that you can move between service providers as you please. There could even be a standardized protocol that service providers could use to easily update DNS entries when the user requests a move, assuming that you can identify yourself via some other means.
- creato 5y ago
  The service you propose will either have the same problem as google, be vulnerable to social engineering attacks (like phone number providers), or be tied to extremely expensive infrastructure (e.g. enable post office or DMV offices to validate identity for the purposes of managing access to this account). Even if google had customer support agents, what do you want them to do in cases like this? They can't actually validate anyone as the owner of an account, they'd simply be the targets of people begging to access accounts. Edit: the implication being, we probably simply need most people to just not depend on email for anything important. Unless you can maintain multiple 2FA methods, your email account isn't reliable enough to be trusted with important things.
  - bloak 5y ago
    Yes, it would be "tied to extremely expensive infrastructure" ... that already exists. So no additional cost.
  - 5y ago
bamboozled 5y ago
Once we were having trouble with GKE hosted in Asia, it was causing out business a major outage and it wasn't something which I had the power to fix, from memory, half way through a cluster upgrade, Google ran out of compute so the upgrade was stuck half and the control plane ended up in a bad state and some how this impacted the networking (it shouldn't but it happened). I was unable to provision a new cluster due to the lack of capacity so we were stuck. This wasn't the first problem we'd had either. There was absolutely no one to call, no one to even alert to warn other customers, the status pages were all green. Instead of bothering with Google, I just opened an account on AWS and migrated whole stack to AWS in ~ 3 hours, pointed DNS at the new load balancers and we never went back and continued doing business without issue for as long as I can remember.
- evercast 5y ago
  I'm certainly far from finding excuses for Google, but I have strong doubts when reading stories like this. I wonder how is this possible? If you check their support packages at https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/, they provide different options based on how much you are willing to pay. The premium package gives you 15 minute response time and a personal TAM. What am I missing here? They promise a service, but it doesn't work? AWS seems to also have support packages: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/, and their response times are also not supposed to be instant.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    Have you ever tried to get one of those packages ? You need to have an interview etc.It’s not straight forward or cheap. We tried to sign up and have a TAM assigned but gave up. It was a lot of effort. Amazon gives great support at an affordable price.
minusSeven 5y ago
>I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." That experience underscored that notion for me. But this isn't true for all of us, google provides support through paid programs and sells services to other businesses. This is more of google specific problem.
neycoda 5y ago
Google makes money on Gmail. That means they can pay for customer support.

vbezhenar 5y ago

I submitted security bug to Chrome. It was not very serious or urgent. Somebody looked at it in the first hour, in the first day it was analyzed and in the first week it was resolved. I was kind of surprised, because I was sure that public feedback from nobody is going to be put in a very long queue.

eschulz 5y ago

Was the screaming guy no paying for some service?

aesyondu 5y ago
I'm a bit confused as well. > he paid Google something for some service and was entitled to phone support and he demanded someone help him This does not support the conclusion about free users being the product, since the customer was paying based on the statement above.

RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago

only tangentially related but that phrase is a pet peeve of mine. You are always the product if you are using software - free or paid. Netflix is sure as hell going to use your data the same way youtube would. The only exception of course is most but not all FOSS.

Arshxd 5y ago
- webXL 5y ago
  Looking at Apple's latest hardware changes, I think users are once again the customers.
davidgh 5y ago
I think there’s a difference. “You are the product” means that your usage and data are the primary thing the company develops (with software) so it can be sold to their actual customers, namely, advertisers. I’ve been involved with many software companies that gather various metrics (analytics, crash logs, user info, etc.) but do not sell that data to anyone. As such, the user is not “the product” but the customer. I think there’s a meaningful difference here.
- zo1 5y ago
  In those cases the user is an asset for the company. And not "asset" in a good way if you ask me. It's more of an resource than anything noble.
vgb2k18 5y ago
Since it's a pet peeve we share I'll add... I feel it's a bi-directional exchange. A trade. I consume a product (Gmail) and they consume a product (my personal information). At best I'd be "a" product not exclusively "the" product.
chaxor 5y ago
Self hosted is the only good future

leoh 5y ago

You are actually pointing out a tremendous opportunity that Google has internally and externally. I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous asset for Google.

mattnewton 5y ago
If it's about search, you could always use go/bad I think?
judge2020 5y ago
https://issuetracker.google.com/ https://issuetracker.google.com/ is supposed to be it, but if it were completely open and easy to use i'm sure they'd need a dedicated moderation team just for filtering the issues. The knowledge and dedication barrier is a frustrating but mostly effective way to weed out those with non-issues or issues that really don't affect them much (however humane you believe that is).
- xg15 5y ago
  I mean yeah, then they should put up a dedicated moderation team to do so. It's not like they have not enough money to do so.
igetspam 5y ago
Did GUTS not survive? When I left, it was pretty solid. Some very close friends of mine spent years on that system. Haven't thought about it in a while but it was so simple and easy. Then again, that was a decade ago.
- mike_d 5y ago
  GUTS is still used for things like desk moves, but buganizer is where eng tickets live. (at least when I left a few years ago)
5y ago

martyvis 5y ago

I've subscribed to Google One for a few years. (When I say "pay", I'm using credit from answering surveys from Google a few times a week). It's only a couple of dollars a month, it gives you more online cloud storage, but it also gives you a chat and call service to Google. I have used it a couple of times - once to help me push LG to release updates on a phone (they kept saying it was Google's responsibility), another to one get my wife properly added to be able to use the Home smart speaker. Both times chat was followed up a call to a real person (that was understandable, and willing to chase up and respond to the issue). I feel if I had an account issue it would similarly work out.

judge2020 5y ago
I think the issue is that the form is indeed locked behind being logged in[0], so the phone support won't work for login issues when you have no other device logged in. 0: https://support.google.com/googleone/contact/googleone_c2c?hl=en&utm_source=googleone_web https://support.google.com/googleone/contact/googleone_c2c?h...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
technofiend 5y ago
I'm trying to use Google One now to fix an issue and it's been a struggle. Hopefully they'll eventually work it out but frankly without G1 I would probably just throw my Nest cameras out and dispute all future nest charges. Google really need to work on customer service if they're going to offer services that need it.

ngold 5y ago

Disclaimer. I'm a new Google play thing, by giving them money. Just registered a website through them and am about to release a game on the playstore. Fully dependant on zero custom service now. The one thing I've never understood about google. Some sort of law for a trillion dollar company to have customer service or something. Google should be employing 10's of thousands of customer service employees to take calls to troubleshoot their customers issues. On a side note. Here is my.... the simplest website you have seen since 1989. https://simplegametime.com https://simplegametime.com I'm not running a user data farm. I just want to make stupid games, like... P.S. Zero advertising for anything including my game. Just a 7 line privacy policy. Don't need much more.

rzz3 5y ago
More laws aren’t always the answer. Really, we should just be using a company that gives a shit about its users.
- ngold 5y ago
  True. The sheer scale of not giving a crap is what is truly impressive. Alphabet has built a monster system meant solely to not have a phone number. That's a scary innovation.
  - darig 5y ago
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Problem is it all works just fine until you get locked out and have no options. So the market won't ever gradually move over because its only a very small % who get hit with an awful experience while everyone else is perfectly fine.
  - ngold 5y ago
    And now I'm signed up to the system. It's terrifying. At any point. You're done. Hence the nothing clause. I'm sure any game I submit to the play will be wrapped in googs analytics. No matter what my privacy police says.

joering2 5y ago

> "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." Xoogler here - actually we used to say "if you are not buying advertising from us, Google can't help you at all". And just recently I am great example of that. I used to have a Gsuite account at $6/per month for 3 years, then decided to give up on it b/c I wasn't using it. But unfortunately the domain expired before I could properly disconnect it and cancel my account. You can probably already imagine at this point what kind of hell I went thru with "google help". Ultimately I had someone from India called me 3 times to explain - the questionnaire they sent me has to be answer in specific format: each question has to have one paragraph space, then tab (9), then my answer. I kid you not! I spent 3 weeks, been transferred over email ticket about 10 times and every time they told me the same thing. Even if I did exactly how they want it - I guess email was automatically eating up the tabulate key and replacing it with spaces. Eventually a buddy of mine who still works there (different dept) told me customer support forwards your email to some account that parses message automatically, and they cannot even change one single letter in your message. Even when explaining them on the phone that I am following up with their stupid protocol of one new line, then tab, then my answer, then next line must be second question, their program must be messing it up. Eventually I gave up on their customer support. It took me/them six months of chargeback disputes for $6 each month until my account must have popped out on someones screen and Google employee gave me 3.5 seconds of their time to click "close this account".

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>about how he paid Google something for some service >I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." it seems even if he did pay he was the product, which frankly jibes with my experience of paying for things at Google.

durnygbur 5y ago
If you pay for it, you simply like it like this.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  As a normal rule I don't know what customer service is like at a company I'm paying for things at, until I have something go wrong and I realize it sucks.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product."" But it sounds like this "extremely irate user" was paying for it.

steelframe 5y ago
Yeah, fair point. It's been several years, so maybe my memory of all the details is a bit hazy by now. I just recall that at one point one of the salespeople was addressing a point about something or other involving the user having paid for something. I have no idea whether the user was telling the complete truth (were they referring to something they used to subscribe to and don't any more?) or whether at the time whatever they had paid Google for would have entitled the user to phone support for GMail account access issues. Whatever was going on, the user wasn't able to find any avenues to get the support they needed for their issue. Regardless I agree with other comments to the effect that even if you are paying, you are often still the product!
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "Regardless I agree with other comments to the effect that even if you are paying, you are often still the product!" The anaylsis needs to go further than whether one is paying or not. IMHO. It is not rare to see HN commenters who appear to believe that the act of paying some "user fee" to a "tech" company that willfully caters to advertising, devotes almost all of its resources toward catering to advertisers, and derives almost all its revenue from advertising services, is somehow meaningful.

hericium 5y ago

> Google office there. The Googlers sitting around Seriously? You stated that you left the cult.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

Even when you have paid Google products that come with support, it is really awful. They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. Just a simple clarification of something in their documentation. I was already under pressure to migrate to Office360, I stopped fighting after that. My employer is a huge AWS user and Google is constantly chasing us with a treasure chest of free credit to migrate over, their prices are significantly cheaper, but everyone agrees it’s worth the premium to stay with AWS simply because they answer the phone. (If you have never used AWS’s enterprise support, those guys are worth every penny.)

scrollaway 5y ago
> They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. I find that extremely difficult to believe without more context. Google support isn’t that bad. I’ve had a mediocre-to-good experience with it over the years. With that said, while I agree that aws business and enterprise support is worth the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, so is the five bucks a month for a google workspace account that includes support.
- kikimora 5y ago
  A few years back I wanted to call then but didn’t find a number. How do you contact Google’s support?
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    If you have a google workspace account and need google support, you can go in the admin console, help section in the top right, there is a contact form with phone and chat options.
    - afandian 5y ago
      What if you can't log in?

kodemager 5y ago

You’d wonder why they have corporate sales. I’ve worked in enterprise for a long time and we’d laugh at the notion whenever someone suggested we buy any Google service because easy access to phone support when things go wrong is one of the key selling points in enterprise. It’s why Microsoft has done so well for itself in this area over the decades. Sure Office helps, but the fact that your operations guys can be on the phone with their Seattle based offices, and get hourly updates where Microsoft calls you, when something big goes wrong is pure gold to any IT manager in any enterprise. Not only because it lets you solve issues faster, but also because you can tell the organisation that IT is on the phone with Microsoft’s head offices and you are working on a solution with them.

ulrikrasmussen 5y ago

It's pretty crazy to think about the fact that your email is de-facto your online identity, as it is the universal second factor that is used as a fallback if other login mechanisms fail. An email service is two things: a global name user@emailprovider.tld, which is really your online identity, and an email service that hosts the SMTP, IMAP and DNS services required for the identity to function. People are willing to hand over not just the ownership of the service but also their global digital identity (the email address) to a third-party which now assumes total control of it, and which does not have any interest in supporting you. It is a major hassle to move to another provider, even a paid one, because your email address is tied to the service provider. Because email addresses are practically a requirement to function in society, I think they should be a public service. Everyone should have the right to get an email address controlled by a public service institution which guarantees you that you can move between service providers as you please. There could even be a standardized protocol that service providers could use to easily update DNS entries when the user requests a move, assuming that you can identify yourself via some other means.

creato 5y ago
The service you propose will either have the same problem as google, be vulnerable to social engineering attacks (like phone number providers), or be tied to extremely expensive infrastructure (e.g. enable post office or DMV offices to validate identity for the purposes of managing access to this account). Even if google had customer support agents, what do you want them to do in cases like this? They can't actually validate anyone as the owner of an account, they'd simply be the targets of people begging to access accounts. Edit: the implication being, we probably simply need most people to just not depend on email for anything important. Unless you can maintain multiple 2FA methods, your email account isn't reliable enough to be trusted with important things.
- bloak 5y ago
  Yes, it would be "tied to extremely expensive infrastructure" ... that already exists. So no additional cost.
- 5y ago

bamboozled 5y ago

Once we were having trouble with GKE hosted in Asia, it was causing out business a major outage and it wasn't something which I had the power to fix, from memory, half way through a cluster upgrade, Google ran out of compute so the upgrade was stuck half and the control plane ended up in a bad state and some how this impacted the networking (it shouldn't but it happened). I was unable to provision a new cluster due to the lack of capacity so we were stuck. This wasn't the first problem we'd had either. There was absolutely no one to call, no one to even alert to warn other customers, the status pages were all green. Instead of bothering with Google, I just opened an account on AWS and migrated whole stack to AWS in ~ 3 hours, pointed DNS at the new load balancers and we never went back and continued doing business without issue for as long as I can remember.

evercast 5y ago
I'm certainly far from finding excuses for Google, but I have strong doubts when reading stories like this. I wonder how is this possible? If you check their support packages at https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/, they provide different options based on how much you are willing to pay. The premium package gives you 15 minute response time and a personal TAM. What am I missing here? They promise a service, but it doesn't work? AWS seems to also have support packages: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/, and their response times are also not supposed to be instant.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Have you ever tried to get one of those packages ? You need to have an interview etc.It’s not straight forward or cheap. We tried to sign up and have a TAM assigned but gave up. It was a lot of effort. Amazon gives great support at an affordable price.

minusSeven 5y ago

>I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." That experience underscored that notion for me. But this isn't true for all of us, google provides support through paid programs and sells services to other businesses. This is more of google specific problem.

neycoda 5y ago

Google makes money on Gmail. That means they can pay for customer support.