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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Google certainly doesn't represent all big corporations. I've had excellent experiences contacting Amazon as a consumer, and have almost always had my issue resolved with clear answers, store credits if needed, etc.

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As a customer. And good on them for taking care of their customers. But then again they're also selling something to their primary customers. Try being a seller on Amazon and see what you think of the customer service. There was a post here just the other day about someone losing all access to their seller account because they changed a name on their personal kindle... that's ridiculous.

Google doesn't interact directly with their primary customers. They provide free services that draw eyeballs to serve up ads. That's it. If they were selling you access to google search (their primary means of income), I would imagine you'd find a much better experience.

We aren't their primary customers, advertisers are. If its free (Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc) you are the product.

Parent comment is talking about being a paying customer of AdSense and still not getting support. The problem transcends the 'you are the product' and goes to "no, their support is terrible even for their paying customers."

Look at it from Google's perspective, unless you are pushing volume and have a dedicated account manager, they will not help you, it'd cost too much for them to do so.

It wouldn't cost them too much, they just don't have an incentive. They've got a virtual monopoly on the search market. If there were 5 different search engines with market share split between them all, you can bet that they'd either need to provide superior support or superior margins to maintain their market share.

This is a symptom of a monopoly, not a symptom of the market/an inability to make money while providing support. I mean... let's get real, look at their quarterly income statements. There is a LOT of wiggle room to hire support personnel,

Sure, they could afford to hire support personnel, but they would be deluged with inquiries on day 1, even if less than 1 percent of Google's users contacted them every 5 years.

1% of ~2 roughly billion users = 20 million users. With one request every 5 years that'd be roughly 10k support requests per day. Considering that a lot of the cases can be answered very quickly (or possibly automatically) you can easily handle that with a couple hundred employees. The cost of that would be roughly 1/1000 of Google's annual income.

> The cost of that would be roughly 1/1000 of Google's annual income.

I don't own Google stock but 0.1% of revenue would be a huge number that you just can't blink away. Especially when it is not a one-off whim I mean spectacular moonshot but rather an ongoing business obligation.

I hate that the service sucks but I'd rather they don't waste money like this.

It's going to cost them even more in PR down the line. I'm at the point of not buying an more google products and I know many other people who have had the same experience and sworn them off as well.

Definitely, if there was another viable smartphone platform I'd be all over it, cause Android is a burning dumpster fire that Google has no intention of cleaning up. Funnily enough, Microsoft with the same OEMs (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc) on the same SOCs got the drivers they needed upstreamed so they could provide multi-year updates to their devices.

Google could get the drivers for most Android phones mainlined if they wanted to push the issue, but it isn't a concern for them apparently.

The biggest problem with this for me is the app ecosystem needed. If proper Android app emulation was present then I would love to try an alternative OS, but currently I rely too much on apps that are only available on Android/iOS for which a web app would provide a very poor experience.

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