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Comment by zadkey | Hacker News Reader

I can't agree more. Google has some of the crappiest support around. A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune.

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"A few lawsuits" is an so much an understatement that it might as well be a lie. You'd need one out of every few (13.75) people in the USA to successfully bring a $5k lawsuit against Google to reduce them from highly profitable to break-even. Lawsuits and bad publicity only matter if they're more costly than ignoring the problem.

If the company in the article successfully sued for the $5,000 they were being extorted over that wouldn't even matter. A few of those lawsuits wouldn't matter. A few thousand of those lawsuits wouldn't even matter.

The European Commission last year issued a massive lawsuit against Google Adsense of $1.6 billion [1]. Google marked that EC fine down in its SEC filings on page 86 of their 10-K [2]. European Commission fees constitute an effective tax of 1.0% in 2019, which they add to various other factors for a total tax rate of 13.3%. Page 89 shows that Google revenue was $160B, while expenses were $40B.

Google isn't moral, they don't see this fine as a mistake to be learned from. It's an operating expense. They won't change their tune unless it's more profitable to do so.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...

[2]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20200204_alphabet_10K.pd...

You don't need to sue Google enough to completely eat up their profits, you just need to sue them enough that it becomes cheaper for them to staff a better customer service department.

yeah. bullets are mort apt than fines to change people behavior. bank notes do not protect from bullets.

Google isn't moral, they don't see this fine as a mistake to be learned from. It's an operating expense. They won't change their tune unless it's more profitable to do so.

This is exactly how Microsoft grew evil.

What I'm seeing is industry is doing the same thing to them that they did to Intel. Encapsulate them in a cyst like the body does to a parasitic worm. Basically all of their non ad ventures will fail due customers reflexively choosing their competitors products. Just like no one will pick Intel as a vendor outside of their core products.

> A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune.

I'm not sure about that. Google's crappy support is deeply, deeply embedded in their culture -- for all the benefits, it's one of the downsides of their PhD-heavy, engineering-first mentality, because engineers and academics loathe dealing with people, and to the extent that it's necessary for some system, regard that as a sign that system was improperly designed.

Google would need a major culture shift to start having good support, and unfortunately it's the exact kind of culture shift that would anger and alienate a lot of Googlers. Don't count on this changing anytime soon.

That's one lousy excuse for a corporation like Google. This has nothing to do with them being PhD-heavy or engineering-first? (what engineering-first are you referring to btw?) The reason for this is the nature of their business. It's a calculated decision by them in terms of how much is worth spending on support without taking an actual hit to their margins.

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