Hacker News Reader

Comment by PurpleFoxy | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. McDonalds runs at a bigger scale than Google and if I have a problem with my food I wouldn’t have a problem finding a person to complain to.

The problem is google runs at a global scale with less employees than most national companies. If they hired more people, this problem would go away. But of course that would mean they would have to kill their free plans.

Pick your poison. Cheap products but the risk of losing everything, or expensive alternatives with a phone number to call when you have an issue.

View on HN

Yeah, most people are perfectly happy to pay $4 for a Big Mac, but ask them to pay $4 a month for GMail, and they'll be upset.

The problem is that Google thinks profits are more important than providing half decent support.

The users agree because they keep using gmail despite many good paid alternatives existing.

Only because the users haven't yet experienced a situation like this where the real value of "free" gets exposed.

Everyone loves to think "that can't happen to me" then act all surprised when the inevitable happens.

Grashopper and ant with a world full of grashoppers :p

I think we probably need some kind of government regulation so that you can’t just close someone’s account without warning or access to support, or at the very least, you can’t prevent them from exporting their data and migrating to another service.

... because they are? If you can't turn a profit then you go under, regardless of if you have good support or not.

There is a hell of a margin between maximizing-profit-at-the-expense-of-customers and going under. It just happen that Google has now enough critical mass to really not give a fuck about their customers.

McDonald's regularly has some machine down and when I need a refund from a purchase through the app everybody says you have to ask someone else.

That’s an interesting problem and it seems related to Googles issues. McDonalds wants to move in to a more automated, less staff system and you end up where no one at the store knows how to refund external purchases or prevent people from ordering things that are unavailable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com