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Comment by n1000 | Hacker News Reader

> ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff.

Why is it that large companies like Apple and Google are so hard to reach? Remember the story of the Dash iOS app developer that got kicked out of the store. He also practically was unable to reach anyone.

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To be fair what that guy originally said and what happened were two different things. Apple contacted him before they shut down his account. At least that's what Apple said...

http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash...

The author says that's not true. He has phone call recording proving he is right: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-and-apple-my-side-of-the-story

He has a phone recording of how he screws himself, by recording a phone call and trying to escalate a situation that Apple was trying to fix.

He's not in the App Store today, because just posting that call without consent shows he can't be trusted.

They may have tried to contact him at the address of the second account, which was spamming the store and may or may not have been him.

Is the developer from Dash based in the USA? Does two party consent cross international lines? He may not have the concept of not posting a phone conversation because it's a legally allowed thing and he didn't think to check what was the legal norm in Palo Alto.

He's not in the US and it may have been legal. It's still astonishingly stupid. Apple was trying to defuse the situation and asked him to call of the pitchfork-wielding mob by communicating their point of view (an account he paid for was spamming reviews). They were willing to accept his somewhat dubious assertion ("I paid for someone's account, and gave them hardware, and sometimes borrowed that hardware again, but it's not me and I'm in no way responsible").

But instead of accepting this resolution allowing everyone to safe face he seemed to be drunk with the power of the solidarity he had gotten initially, or he just wanted to really win the argument. I don't know the motivation, but anyone could have told him that trying to blackmail Apple was not going to end well,

> or he just wanted to really win the argument. I don't know the motivation, but anyone could have told him that trying to blackmail Apple was not going to end well,

So you’d also say someone should never sue Apple for doing something bad, because they might abuse their monopoly power against you if you try to win?

That's an interesting use of the word 'abuse'. I think that with a power balance as unequal as it is Apple needs to show a ton of compassion and restraint in its dealings but I don't think you could say that they were abusing their power.

Sue them in a court of law, if it's bad enough, though be prepared for a long and hard fight. But never try to fight them in the court of public opinion.

Treat people based on their actions.

Paying user of dash here and I've been very impressed by how the developer has allowed the Windows and Linux app zeal to use his document sets and format for free. Only condition was that they don't release a competing version for OS X.

I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Whatever the case may be. I think there are plenty examples where situations escalated simply because the company ignored an urgent and justified request. I remember calling AppleCare and the poor guy on the phone admitted that there was a bug in OSX but had no means to escalate my problem further.

Another example is the recent Spotify bug, which did not receive any attention until the story made it to the top of HN. I think companies actually cause damages to themselves by not reacting sooner.

As an engineer for a related company, I sometimes go and look at the support forums or tickets for my software.

I find hundreds or thousands of complaints. Many are legitimate bugs, and some are user stupidity ("I need to check my mums email but she won't give me her password, can you let me in anyway").

For those which are legitimate bugs, I know, through user metrics, that they only affect a tiny fraction <0.1% of the users. I, and the rest of the engineering team have to prioritize our team between fixing these bugs for the 0.1%, and making the product better for the 99.9%.

It can be a tough choice, but when you've decided that it's time to move on and develop new features, hearing about individual instances of rare bugs is no longer useful. We just aggregate how many users are impacted by each significant bug, and from time to time quash the top ones.

Manually editing a database entry for a single user is no longer privacy-justifiable, so basically the only fix we can do is to fix the bug for all users at once. And if the bug is only affecting 15 out of 300,000,000 users on a product that makes 1 cent per user per year, I can't afford to spend more than 30 seconds on it really, yet most bugfixes are at least a days work.

Thanks for the insight. Makes me understand what is going on "on the other side". Although the message is a bit sad. If you don't scream loud enough it doesn't get fixed.

Steve Jobs seemed to have an ear or the 0.1% :) I am pretty certain one (rare) OSX bug got fixed because I emailed him.

1 cent per user per year sounds very small when most online business gets valued at 1 usd / month per user times 3 years.

Thank you for taking the time for writing this and being so open.

However, I think this approach should be criticized. It's a very concrete improvement for the 0.1% of users dropped in favor of a very vague improvement for an unknown subset of the 99%. Also, the bugs have severe consequences for the users (as in the OP or the Dash case) it would be downright irresponsible to be customer of a company that acts like this.

That is great insight in how many software corporations prioritize tasks. However, rare bugs are often indicators of bigger problems, so it pays to at least investigate them. Not because of 0.1% of affected users, but because it might make things better for 99.9% as a consequence. Not all bugs are like that, of course, but some are.

That's the effect of a (quasi) monopoly.

It's like a DC politician who's above the law - you have so much power that you can literally do what you want.

The solution? Stop using products of the biggest players and start looking for alternatives.

Or possibly the effect of having a user base in the billions. How do you adequately support that?

The amount of tweets @adsense are not bigger than the tweets @klm. Still, KLM has a (terrific) webcare team, while @adsense never replies. Adsense revenue is slightly lower than Airfrance/KLM, but margins are propably 100x higher.

They don't support users because of arrogance. There is no viable alternative, they know that. And even if it costs them more revenue than the total costs of a support team, Google's culture is so accustomed to lavish spending that even 1B in lost revenue is just a blip on the radar.

It's probably not arrogance so much as a lack of perceived necessity.

Stop tweeting at them and use the proper channel.

If your account is worth more than a few cents, they'll gladly speak to you.

KLM doesn't have flights for 3 cents, so doesn't have such a support-timewaster problem.

KLM almost certainly has hundreds of passengers a day whose gross margin is in the pennies.

True, but Google has Billions of customers per day whose margin is in the pennies, and a few hundred thousand significant account holders.

An account holder chosen at random is most likely to be in the former category, unlike klm where a customer chosen at random is likely to have a much higher margin worthy of a few dollars of support costs.

Some might argue a company should support a customer well even if doing so puts that customer as a lifetime lossmaker though.

They don't have billions of Adsense users, hence the comparison with KLM. And even a small publisher can grow into something big.

> Or possibly the effect of having a user base in the billions. How do you adequately support that?

The same way Amazon does? How about banks, airlines and other similar.

I understand that there's little motivation for some online services to improve their customer service experience but Google is especially bad. Even when making a purchase from them (an area where both Apple and Microsoft do much better), you're dealing with a bot with absolutely no other contact point.

Though, hypothetically speaking, if they did deliberately place ProtonMail on their blacklist trying to kill a competing business, then keeping quiet about it for as long as possible would make sense to them.

They're extremely easy to reach if you're paying them money (ie: buying advertising space rather than selling it).

Even with a paid e-mail they are impossible to reach when that mail has problems.

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