It's also much easier to do hard things when you're making billions of dollars.
I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.
I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.
You cannot sell a defective thing then when the customer comes back say "sorry, we actually only made $0.01 on that so we don't provide customer service, goodbye."
Your obligation to not, for instance, arbitrarily revoke someone's account access causing them measurable harm is not dependent on whether you deem yourself to have a sufficient level of profit on the transaction.
Companies have obligations that external and not bounded entirely by their commercial whims.
If I buy something from my local dollar store, they have a no return policy. The items are typically low quality. But they cost a dollar.
My cell company, on the other hand, charges around $60/month for a phone plan, so they have more customer service representatives.
So yes, you can legislate that. By making merchants bear the cost of defects and take a loss on replacing the product, you make it no longer a viable business model to constantly sell broken stuff. It's a proper alignment of incentives.
In a world where Google is being sued for antitrust in part because of a monopoly they built by giving stuff away for free, perhaps making it harder to have a "low margins, but we aren't accountable for anything" business is not a bad thing.
You're also building a strawman - that Google would need to spend a lot per user on customer service to start actually providing customer service instead of refusing to do so for most of its products.
It would need to spend a lot in absolute dollars, sure, but the vast majority of users would have precisely zero support interactions. No one is saying that Google should have an army of 500,000 support reps. Just that it should actually be possible to contact Google without knowing someone who works there.
I think you're building a strawman here. This is a thread about Google having poor customer service, and you're trying to frame it as if Google is refusing to refund defective products. Those are not the same. Google refunds or replaces defective products they sell.
Google has some customer support. It's not very good. Google has several billion users and only about 100k employees total. That's somewhere around 1 employee per 30k users.
Customer support quality is a continuum, not a binary thing. The comment you replied to was pointing out that a company that makes a small amount per user cannot afford the same level of customer service as a company that makes a lot per user.
No one in the thread said Google couldn't hire more customer support. They said looking at customer support quality as an "ad-hoc monopoly test" is biased against companies with huge user bases and small margins per user.
That's the flaw in your argument, they didn't sell anything... You are using a free product, which you are not obligated to use and didn't pay for.