Comment by reuven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reuven | Hacker News Reader

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No, probably not. Think of how much Google earns per employee. Now think of how much they would earn per support employee. The numbers are probably not even even the same order of magnitude.

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 doubt that they ever did the math in the sense of estimating the numbers on a piece of paper. Service number for 10 cents a minute * 60 minutes = 6$ an hour. (My old mobile operator charged 15 eurocents per minute!) There is hardly an excuse for no support. Even less considering that these numbers do not include happy non-tech customers.

If you can't afford to support it you can't afford to run it.

I don't think this is true, Google seem to be doing pretty well financially, as do plenty of other companies with terrible support.

I'm not saying that this is a desirable situation for users. But I also think it's clear that Google has made a calculated decision -- they want to offer their products for free to as many people as possible, and then avoid supporting them.

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.

Support is not a boolean atribute. There is a broad range of support intensity from user forums up to in person, on site support. Different services have different levels of appropriate support and the service provider has to decide what level makes sense - and customers have to decide what they need. (Which I admit can be hard to predict.) There was never any promise of strong individual support for this service.

For many products and services the support would be far more expensive than providing the "main" service.

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.

Not willing to license that business opportunity to smaller/outsourced companies is regretful.

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