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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency

Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take?

And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on BigTable to fix their speed issues?

1. In 2009: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=http:...

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Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?

Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads.

If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.

"I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads."

I thought that one could do that with a Premier Edition Google Apps account.

Yes they can. I have been on Google Apps Premier for 2 or 3 years now.

Yes although Apps Premier comes with a price, it has many other features including ad free mails. You get less spam too

I put together my own mail server on Linode a while back, after getting frustrated with Gmail's ridiculously limited filtering and tagging.

I use RoundCube webmail, Dovecot, Postfix, managesieve, SpamAssassin, and a few custom hacks. It works great. Gmail used to have the added annoyance of making Firefox unusably slow if it was open for hours at a time; I now can have my mailbox open for days at a time with no browser performance hit. I can make filters as simple or complex as I want.

Gmail has now become my spamcatch.

Isn't the appeal of Gmail its slick ajax interface and the fact that mails are presented as threads?

...Both of which RoundCube does quite nicely. The threading in RoundCube isn't quite as good as Gmail, but it's plenty good enough for me.

ah, yes, and when your mail server goes down for a couple hours? that's a lot of fun.

i've managed my own mail servers from ~2000 to 2008, when it practically became a full time job. i use gmail primarily for (1) the spam filter and (2) not having to worry about downtime.

[edit: and on another note, roundcube development is PAINFULLY slow...]

Once I got the basic configuration and initial stuff down, the mail server's uptime has been ... hmm. Pretty damn close to 100% I think. I think there was an outage a bit back, but that one was my fault. I dicked up one of the databases or something.

On the flip side, I never have to worry about missing email. Like, for example, the time (yesterday) that I tried to send code samples from a WP exploit that did a neat job of turning the web server into an IRC-controlled zombie via a fun little Perl script. The person I was sending them to had a Gmail address.

Guess who never received the files? (And wasn't notified, either...)

But then there are people that have to work a lot and don't want to care. Ironically, the main product i am working on is enterprise mail solutions. I could deploy somethign at home or in anotehr datacenter.. but even the time for the setup is too much time to bother with. So in the end, i use gmail for private stuff and our corporate mail system for business. If i'd have the time to setup the toolchain you mentioned including custom hacks, i'd rather go outside or meet friends, for sure. Or work on some other projects..

>> Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?

Answering phone calls from 176 million users? No.

Maintaining a nice little "Google Cares" (And Explicitly Confesses Known Problems We're Working On) blog? Yes.

A little customer service could go a long way.

Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?

No, that would be very difficult. They have only about 20 000 employees. That's 9000 users per employee.

The problem is, the vast majority of those 176 million people have chosen to be in a position where they depend on a service that is run by people who don't care about them personally — who can't care about them, because there are just too many of them. This inevitably means that some of those people, maybe many of them, will get caught in the machine and mangled.

The solution is to provide services like email in a distributed way, instead of with a centralized company. Then, when you have a problem like this, you have access to someone who could plausibly fix it.

The difficulty is that our facilities for providing big centralized servers are leaps and bounds ahead of our facilities for building decentralized applications.

I pay handsomely for Google's Premium service, and I still get no customer service. So now what?

Other people have already commented effectively on the two components of your reply, but let me say that I found the transparency straw man to be the weirder of the two, because that's not how I use that word.

I'd also like to note that from a technical standpoint, I think Google is fantastic. They do great work, I love where they're going with services, and I personally have no complaint with Gmail nor could I improve things were I magically in charge.

But their nearly autistic attitude towards dealing with users is a real problem, and as large as they are, I think they bear a real moral responsibility to make the world a better place. "Don't be evil" is a great motto. I have every reason to believe they try to live up to it. But disengagement from their users to the incredible extent that Google practices it verges dangerously close to evil when it affects so very many people.

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