9 ms·

They actively don't want to support you. Google have an official explanation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HA

by edent 14y ago

They actively don't want to support you. Google have an official explanation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I It boils down to the fact that even if every customer needed 1 minute of support every 2 years that would mean they'd have to employ 6 trillion people (or some rubbish). As I said earlier this year, Google have total contempt for their customers - yes, even their paying customers. http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-conundrum/ http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-co... Self host. Don't rely on Google. Sadly, that's the only way to do it.

albertzeyer 14y ago
He talks about 1 billion people needing 10 minutes every 3 years would need 20,000 support people. And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is financially self-hosting.
- r00fus 14y ago
  That's the big difference between Google and say, Apple or Amazon. At other companies, this pressure would cause the formation of a new profit center. For Google, they see it as a quagmire of responsibilities.
- assane101 14y ago
  If they wanted to pay 6k $ to each of these 20k support guy, they could ask for 6k*20k/(1 billion/3) = 36 cents per 10 minutes support !
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes plenty of profit. The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees). Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.
  - nathan_long 14y ago
    Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your argument. The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive. Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users. Of course, they can spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be assuming they're doing that.
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      “Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes.” Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash. “Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.” Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.
      - wtvanhest 14y ago
        A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM, they are revenue/profit centers. Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit. Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.
        Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        The benefit would be being able to sleep at night.
- fakeer 14y ago
  Yes. Google charges you money only because they make it easier for you to host your email and have calendar, chat etc. And on any given day hosting these things on your own is the best option out there but you might have to get your hands dirty or get it from a service provider who doesn't deny the existence of need for human interaction in customer service.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Google acts this way because they can. They are a popular SE from back when they were relatively honest and unbiased and they also buy traffic from Mozilla, iOS, Opera etc. They use that traffic to push down competitors and promote their services via Search completing the circle. When they get some real competition they will be nicer to their users and consumers. If you want to advertise online in any meaningful way, you cannot ignore Google. They know that so they act as a monopolistic tyrant (also see At&T, Verizon, banks etc)
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  Comparing Google to other monopolists and mega-corps with bad customer service is unfair to the latter. All of these companies still have a huge staff trying to give customer support. Google isn't even trying.
  - k3n 14y ago
    I see your point, but I also think you're giving too much credit to the latter: they care not for your well-being, and any notion of "customer service" is 100% in the spirit of retaining or generating revenue.
    - niketdesai 14y ago
      This is pretty much the argument for the other side of the coin. Google probably designed the service understanding that situations like these would arise and would represent a small but acceptable amount of outrage. Altruistically for Google it's probably better to not have support for non-ads-monetization (as in, a product that isn't interfaced with buying advertisers) products. edit: some clarification.
  - snaky 14y ago
    And maybe some of them should not have that huge staff actually and sell their product by lower price instead. I think that's a real opportunitity/niche these days and it will get bigger in a foreseable future.
ihuman 14y ago
Google's explination is a terrible explanation. The assumption that everyone would need support, but that cannot be true. It is just an excuse with no reasoning behind it.
- jaredmcateer 14y ago
  It's not an assumption, it's averaging, for every few people that wouldn't need support, there is one that would need support three or more times.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    Isn't the fact that they are, by and large, getting away with not having any support at all proof that it wouldn't be such an overwhelming cost?
    - badgar 14y ago
      No, logic doesn't work that way. Absence of X does not prove that X is cheap.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - fusiongyro 14y ago
        You know, in polite conversation "proof" usually doesn't mean "logical proof," the same way "or" usually means "exclusive or" rather than "inclusive or" as it does in formal logic. I mean evidence. Especially since we're talking about something so incredibly squishy and suppositional, nobody is going to be able to "prove" anything interesting in a formal capacity.
        badgar 14y ago
        Generally, we consider a service being too expensive to be a good reason for a company not to offer that service. So not offering a service might be evidence that said service is too expensive to offer/operate. You can see this argument being made prominently in the Linode thread on the front page - someone complains that they don't offer a $10/month plan, and others point out it would be extremely expensive to support. Thus the lack of the $10/month plan is used as evidence that it is likely too expensive to offer. You've gone the completely other way: you're saying the service not being offered is evidence that it is cheap. This is the opposite of the typical argument. So I'm reducing your idea here to its simplest logical form, trying to make it super clear to readers (and hopefully you) how ass-backwards it is.
yaix 14y ago
> yes, even their paying customers This was the thread on Webmasterword, when Google closed Million USD Adwords advertiser accounts without warning, after changing their guidelines unannounced http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm Google is completely automated, and individual customers don't exist, only statistically significant numbers. > Self host. Don't rely on Google. Or any other company if you don't have a contract that legally protects your data while it is on another company's server.
- TrevorJ 14y ago
  When it comes to paying customers, they do give you more access to personal support but you've got to be spending a serious amount of coin with them to get to that point.
  - tapp 14y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "access to support." My company, and several of my customers with whom I've discussed this issue, spend a significant chunk of money on Google Apps and related Google services. We do get a customer support #, but all that means is someone answers the phone. I'm not sure we've ever received actual support from them. We have trouble tickets for significant, documented issues that have been open for YEARS. The official answer is that someone from engineering will look into it and get back to us. We're looking into ways to reduce our dependency on Google services, but of course it's a challenging and time-consuming endeavor to migrate away.
    - TrevorJ 14y ago
      >Depends on what you mean by "access to support." Weekly scheduled conference calls, and a specific agent assigned to our account with whom we had direct access.
runjake 14y ago
In your blog post above, you repeatedly imply or directly state that we are its customers. I believe that's a huge error in your argument. We are not Google's customers, we are Google's product. Google is an advertising business and we are the eyeballs it seeks. Android is merely meant as a pathway for those eyeballs. Same with Gmail, Youtube, etc. Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.
- edent 14y ago
  I agree when we're talking about Gmail & YouTube. But when I'm paying Google several hundred pounds to buy a Nexus device, I think that I am a customer.
  - outside1234 14y ago
    You are a customer for the hardware, but not the software or services, where you are again the product.
  - Navarr 14y ago
    Google Play, however, has customer support. http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=play_contact&rd=1 http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=p...
    - bchallenor 14y ago
      Returning my Nexus 4 was a traumatic experience. It took over a month, with far too many emails and phone calls. Sadly, the customer support staff are probably trying their best, but the information and systems they have are completely inadequate.
      - ideonexus 14y ago
        I had the exact same experience. I emailed to return the nexus, did not get a response. I called them and they said they would set up a return, then I didn't hear anything. I called them again and they told me I past the deadline to return the tablet so they couldn't accept it. I then spent an hour arguing with them that I had started the return process before the deadline and that it was their lousy support that put us past the deadline. Finally I just had to be obstinate and say "I want to speak to your manager." over and over and over again until I got to someone who knew how to look up my support ticket and see that I had started the return process before the deadline. Eventually they sent me the info I needed to return the device, but by that time I was so scared I would send it to them and then not get a refund that I chose to sell it instead.
mayukh 14y ago
I actually see this as an opportunity for Google to experiment with customer support. Seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for some basic level of support - so why not test that hypothesis ? Setup a separate Customer Support organization for specific services. Staff with lower-skilled folks from cheaper locations (since cost seems to be such a huge concern). So a $X yearly plan entitles you to Y number of queries and gets you a response from customer support in N days. For example a $20,000 per year engineer (very reasonable in lower cost locations) would require 2000 users paying 10 per year to breakeven. The question is why would google even bother ?
mangoman 14y ago
How do you feel about Google Fiber if this is how you feel Google treats its customers? When it comes to Google Fiber it seems like the whole community is incredibly excited, but many people also seem to hold the opinion that Google couldn't care less about its customers. I'm expecting Google Fiber to be an incredibly wonderful service, but do those who hold the opinion that Google "has total contempt" for its customers expect Google Fiber to be an awful service as well? Wouldn't that essentially defeat the purpose of Google Fiber? I think Google devotes proportional resource to the products which give them value, and I think that's probably why Groups is being negelected. It is unfortunate for Groups users, but Google does have to make money.
- omni 14y ago
  Google Fiber offers plenty support options. http://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2457687?hl=en http://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2457687?hl=en
- edent 14y ago
  Google Fibre isn't even on the radar for me. I'm in the UK and, as far as I can tell, it's only available to half-a-dozen people in the middle of nowhere. If people are paying Google to be their ISP, I'd like an even higher level of customer support compared to the competition. However, I'd expect it to be worse.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wolfgke 14y ago
If there is demand of support (and there seems to be): why don't they sell support - let's say 100$ per hour (or more if they think this is too low)?
mark_l_watson 14y ago
Yes, self host anything that matters. I love free services from Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. but for things that matter like my email, my web sites, and my blog I spend a little money and time and control everything. I prefer being a paying customer. If I should ever have a problem with Dropbox or Evernote I bet I get good support. And, I have my data backed up locally.

by edent 14y ago

albertzeyer 14y ago

He talks about 1 billion people needing 10 minutes every 3 years would need 20,000 support people. And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is financially self-hosting.

r00fus 14y ago
That's the big difference between Google and say, Apple or Amazon. At other companies, this pressure would cause the formation of a new profit center. For Google, they see it as a quagmire of responsibilities.
assane101 14y ago
If they wanted to pay 6k $ to each of these 20k support guy, they could ask for 6k*20k/(1 billion/3) = 36 cents per 10 minutes support !
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes plenty of profit. The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees). Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your argument. The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive. Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users. Of course, they can spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be assuming they're doing that.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    “Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes.” Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash. “Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.” Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.
    - wtvanhest 14y ago
      A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM, they are revenue/profit centers. Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit. Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.
      - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        The benefit would be being able to sleep at night.
fakeer 14y ago
Yes. Google charges you money only because they make it easier for you to host your email and have calendar, chat etc. And on any given day hosting these things on your own is the best option out there but you might have to get your hands dirty or get it from a service provider who doesn't deny the existence of need for human interaction in customer service.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Google acts this way because they can. They are a popular SE from back when they were relatively honest and unbiased and they also buy traffic from Mozilla, iOS, Opera etc. They use that traffic to push down competitors and promote their services via Search completing the circle. When they get some real competition they will be nicer to their users and consumers. If you want to advertise online in any meaningful way, you cannot ignore Google. They know that so they act as a monopolistic tyrant (also see At&T, Verizon, banks etc)

onemorepassword 14y ago
Comparing Google to other monopolists and mega-corps with bad customer service is unfair to the latter. All of these companies still have a huge staff trying to give customer support. Google isn't even trying.
- k3n 14y ago
  I see your point, but I also think you're giving too much credit to the latter: they care not for your well-being, and any notion of "customer service" is 100% in the spirit of retaining or generating revenue.
  - niketdesai 14y ago
    This is pretty much the argument for the other side of the coin. Google probably designed the service understanding that situations like these would arise and would represent a small but acceptable amount of outrage. Altruistically for Google it's probably better to not have support for non-ads-monetization (as in, a product that isn't interfaced with buying advertisers) products. edit: some clarification.
- snaky 14y ago
  And maybe some of them should not have that huge staff actually and sell their product by lower price instead. I think that's a real opportunitity/niche these days and it will get bigger in a foreseable future.

ihuman 14y ago

Google's explination is a terrible explanation. The assumption that everyone would need support, but that cannot be true. It is just an excuse with no reasoning behind it.

jaredmcateer 14y ago
It's not an assumption, it's averaging, for every few people that wouldn't need support, there is one that would need support three or more times.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  Isn't the fact that they are, by and large, getting away with not having any support at all proof that it wouldn't be such an overwhelming cost?
  - badgar 14y ago
    No, logic doesn't work that way. Absence of X does not prove that X is cheap.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - fusiongyro 14y ago
      You know, in polite conversation "proof" usually doesn't mean "logical proof," the same way "or" usually means "exclusive or" rather than "inclusive or" as it does in formal logic. I mean evidence. Especially since we're talking about something so incredibly squishy and suppositional, nobody is going to be able to "prove" anything interesting in a formal capacity.
      - badgar 14y ago
        Generally, we consider a service being too expensive to be a good reason for a company not to offer that service. So not offering a service might be evidence that said service is too expensive to offer/operate. You can see this argument being made prominently in the Linode thread on the front page - someone complains that they don't offer a $10/month plan, and others point out it would be extremely expensive to support. Thus the lack of the $10/month plan is used as evidence that it is likely too expensive to offer. You've gone the completely other way: you're saying the service not being offered is evidence that it is cheap. This is the opposite of the typical argument. So I'm reducing your idea here to its simplest logical form, trying to make it super clear to readers (and hopefully you) how ass-backwards it is.

yaix 14y ago

> yes, even their paying customers This was the thread on Webmasterword, when Google closed Million USD Adwords advertiser accounts without warning, after changing their guidelines unannounced http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm Google is completely automated, and individual customers don't exist, only statistically significant numbers. > Self host. Don't rely on Google. Or any other company if you don't have a contract that legally protects your data while it is on another company's server.

TrevorJ 14y ago
When it comes to paying customers, they do give you more access to personal support but you've got to be spending a serious amount of coin with them to get to that point.
- tapp 14y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "access to support." My company, and several of my customers with whom I've discussed this issue, spend a significant chunk of money on Google Apps and related Google services. We do get a customer support #, but all that means is someone answers the phone. I'm not sure we've ever received actual support from them. We have trouble tickets for significant, documented issues that have been open for YEARS. The official answer is that someone from engineering will look into it and get back to us. We're looking into ways to reduce our dependency on Google services, but of course it's a challenging and time-consuming endeavor to migrate away.
  - TrevorJ 14y ago
    >Depends on what you mean by "access to support." Weekly scheduled conference calls, and a specific agent assigned to our account with whom we had direct access.

runjake 14y ago

In your blog post above, you repeatedly imply or directly state that we are its customers. I believe that's a huge error in your argument. We are not Google's customers, we are Google's product. Google is an advertising business and we are the eyeballs it seeks. Android is merely meant as a pathway for those eyeballs. Same with Gmail, Youtube, etc. Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.

edent 14y ago
I agree when we're talking about Gmail & YouTube. But when I'm paying Google several hundred pounds to buy a Nexus device, I think that I am a customer.
- outside1234 14y ago
  You are a customer for the hardware, but not the software or services, where you are again the product.
- Navarr 14y ago
  Google Play, however, has customer support. http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=play_contact&rd=1 http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=p...
  - bchallenor 14y ago
    Returning my Nexus 4 was a traumatic experience. It took over a month, with far too many emails and phone calls. Sadly, the customer support staff are probably trying their best, but the information and systems they have are completely inadequate.
    - ideonexus 14y ago
      I had the exact same experience. I emailed to return the nexus, did not get a response. I called them and they said they would set up a return, then I didn't hear anything. I called them again and they told me I past the deadline to return the tablet so they couldn't accept it. I then spent an hour arguing with them that I had started the return process before the deadline and that it was their lousy support that put us past the deadline. Finally I just had to be obstinate and say "I want to speak to your manager." over and over and over again until I got to someone who knew how to look up my support ticket and see that I had started the return process before the deadline. Eventually they sent me the info I needed to return the device, but by that time I was so scared I would send it to them and then not get a refund that I chose to sell it instead.

mayukh 14y ago

I actually see this as an opportunity for Google to experiment with customer support. Seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for some basic level of support - so why not test that hypothesis ? Setup a separate Customer Support organization for specific services. Staff with lower-skilled folks from cheaper locations (since cost seems to be such a huge concern). So a $X yearly plan entitles you to Y number of queries and gets you a response from customer support in N days. For example a $20,000 per year engineer (very reasonable in lower cost locations) would require 2000 users paying 10 per year to breakeven. The question is why would google even bother ?

mangoman 14y ago

How do you feel about Google Fiber if this is how you feel Google treats its customers? When it comes to Google Fiber it seems like the whole community is incredibly excited, but many people also seem to hold the opinion that Google couldn't care less about its customers. I'm expecting Google Fiber to be an incredibly wonderful service, but do those who hold the opinion that Google "has total contempt" for its customers expect Google Fiber to be an awful service as well? Wouldn't that essentially defeat the purpose of Google Fiber? I think Google devotes proportional resource to the products which give them value, and I think that's probably why Groups is being negelected. It is unfortunate for Groups users, but Google does have to make money.

omni 14y ago
Google Fiber offers plenty support options. http://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2457687?hl=en http://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2457687?hl=en
edent 14y ago
Google Fibre isn't even on the radar for me. I'm in the UK and, as far as I can tell, it's only available to half-a-dozen people in the middle of nowhere. If people are paying Google to be their ISP, I'd like an even higher level of customer support compared to the competition. However, I'd expect it to be worse.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wolfgke 14y ago

If there is demand of support (and there seems to be): why don't they sell support - let's say 100$ per hour (or more if they think this is too low)?

mark_l_watson 14y ago

Yes, self host anything that matters. I love free services from Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. but for things that matter like my email, my web sites, and my blog I spend a little money and time and control everything. I prefer being a paying customer. If I should ever have a problem with Dropbox or Evernote I bet I get good support. And, I have my data backed up locally.