Hacker News Reader

Comment by EarthLaunch | Hacker News Reader

A company without customer support is incentivizing everyone to blare every single problem to the largest possible audience. The overall impression is that the company's products are unpleasant and dysfunctional. It's the opposite of advertising. Is not having support really worth the damage this causes to a brand?

That said, many people treat support so badly that offering it may be worth avoiding on principle.

View on HN

> Is not having support really worth the damage this causes to a brand?

Once you reach a certain size the reputation of your brand is almost meaningless. Some of the largest and most successful companies around are almost universally hated and have terrible reputations. Those companies don't care and they continue to make unpopular decisions and actively screw over their customers and their employees all while pulling in record profits.

Maybe your confounding "large company" with monopoly or duopoly?

Can you give examples of large companies with more than 1 competitor who get away with treating customers badly in the long run?

Oracle

Google cloud is a distant third in the cloud space. So claiming they are a monopoly is frankly pretty ridiculous.

I think we agree then don't we?

Google Cloud has competition, people dislike them because of their lack of support, thus they are a distant third and likely NOT getting away with it in the long run?

Bravo, you've built the perfect circular argument.

Oracle, Comcast, Nestle, Equifax, Philip Morris.

Depends on your definition of monopoly I guess. AT&T, Amazon, Comcast, Google, Paypal, Exxon, Microsoft, Philip Morris, DuPont, Facebook, Monsanto, Electronic Arts, and United Airlines are all very much hated and there are "alternatives" and "competitors" enough that they aren't illegal monopolies under our current and admittedly broken laws (although some of them have been in trouble previously)

Some of those are not hated by their “customers” to be fair - but a decent number are. And the vast majority of people don’t have “much issue” so they keep plugging along.

Amazon support is better and AWS makes more money. It's worth it.

GCP has paid support, it starts at around $30/month and gets you an assigned human within 4 hours or something.

Yeah, which really sucks if you don't want to shell out that money. I don't have paid support and had to go through their billing support line (the only support line they offer for non paid customers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com