Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.