I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - will finally end.
Moreover, Google makes money from each mailing list (for example) by displaying ads. The revenue that they bring in from each list is pretty small; the key to their income is the huge number of lists that they support. So losing even 100 lists every week, I have to imagine, wouldn't put much of a dent in their income.
By contrast, the overhead and cost associated with hiring, training, paying (salary + benefits), and supporting an employee are pretty high, particularly when you're offering a commodity product competing with other commodity (and free) products.
From a user's perspective, it seems insane for Google to ignore the business opportunity associated with support. But I have to believe that they've run the math, and that ticking off a number of their customers is cheaper than charging them for decent support.
I would think that the lesson here isn't that Google should be supporting its products, but rather that people should think twice before using unsupported, free products.
I believe that it was Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who said that if you aren't paying for a product, then you're the product. And indeed, that's what we see with Google: They give away their products in order to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
This doesn't make them an evil company (although perhaps other things do). They have a legitimate business model that seems to work for many people.
Complaining that Google isn't willing to offer support, free or paid, is an indication that your interests and Google's aren't aligned. They're not about to change, so perhaps you shouldn't run your service on their system.
There is a LOT of well deserved space for stuff provided "as-is", with an explicit refusal to do any support at all, but still very useful for the 'customer'. For example, large part of free software.
In this case, it clearly does not. This type of (completely understandable) bitching has been going on for years, and Google is not changing a thing.
Its like healthcare. The system doesn't work if you don't pay when you're healthy and only decide to get coverage when you're sick.
Its like healthcare. The system doesn't work if you don't pay when you're healthy and only decide to get coverage when you're sick.
You probably mean some kind of health insurance. In many countries, this insurance is actually a government tax, so you cannot opt out.
So the parallel here would be a mandatory "Google Support Tax" :-)
Would paid support for the free stuff even be a rounding error's (on google scale) worth of revenue, much less profit?
There's no paid level of service for a non-Apps Google Group.