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This is a question I think about a lot. It seems to me that a tech company can only pick two of the following: 1. Free-to-use products 2. High-touch support 3

This is a question I think about a lot. It seems to me that a tech company can only pick two of the following: 1. Free-to-use products 2. High-touch support 3. Profitability I really just don’t see how free-to-use, instant sign-up services with billions of users can feasibly guarantee a human in the loop for every situation that arises. Your position seems to be that if a company can’t provide human support, then it ought not expand their services. I can understand this position, but it has pretty major trade-offs: this would probably exclude large swaths of the world from uploading videos or using email. There are many communities that 1) are unable to pay for email or video hosting services and 2) are not a big target of advertisers’ budgets.

ehnto 4y ago
That might be a shame but it could also be an opportunity for those countries to build their own ecosystems around it. As much as it sounds like a positive to the citizens of the other countries on an individual scale, YouTube and Google being a free global platform stops any chance of local alternatives popping up. Though I am a massive advocate for making software more distributed and local, for the communities they are servicing. So it's worth noting I have that bias. I imagine a much more diverse software landscape, with more providers and more opportunities on smaller scales, rather than global behemoths that hoover up all the users and opportunities.