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Comment by rhdunn | Hacker News Reader

Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.

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If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.

> you scale up support

you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.

If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.

What's the support staff required for a few billion people?

Their problem, not ours.

And yet, building city-sized datacenters is somehow totally doable.

But how else can they get an edge over any possible competition so that they can grow faster? Quarterly reports are coming faster and faster!

That's not scale, Its profit margins.

If firms had a base degree of customer support they were expected to provide, they would still exist. They would just not be as profitable, but customers would be better off.

I seem to remember there was a time when S/W was also designed with the aim to be easy to use, so that the need for support was reduced. It feels like the lesson learned was to keep costs low, not to ensure users were ok.

So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.

You mean like Microsoft, Google (GMail, YouTube, Android), Apple, Facebook, and others?

Sorry, you can't buy an iPhone because Apple has got too many customers.

Sorry, you can't have a GMail account because Google has too many customers.

None of those things sound terrible. I’d argue the world would be better off. The only real losers are those companies you mentioned :shrug:

All of it is greed. 100%.

If you could be profitable with 50 customers providing excellent support, you can be MORE profitable spreading that excellent support across a larger customer base.

Just because none of the big corpos choose to do this does not mean it isn't possible. It's JUST greed.

It depends more on revenues per customer.

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