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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

They actively don't want to support you. Google have an official explanation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I

It boils down to the fact that even if every customer needed 1 minute of support every 2 years that would mean they'd have to employ 6 trillion people (or some rubbish).

As I said earlier this year, Google have total contempt for their customers - yes, even their paying customers. http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-co...

Self host. Don't rely on Google. Sadly, that's the only way to do it.

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> yes, even their paying customers

This was the thread on Webmasterword, when Google closed Million USD Adwords advertiser accounts without warning, after changing their guidelines unannounced http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm

Google is completely automated, and individual customers don't exist, only statistically significant numbers.

> Self host. Don't rely on Google.

Or any other company if you don't have a contract that legally protects your data while it is on another company's server.

When it comes to paying customers, they do give you more access to personal support but you've got to be spending a serious amount of coin with them to get to that point.

Depends on what you mean by "access to support."

My company, and several of my customers with whom I've discussed this issue, spend a significant chunk of money on Google Apps and related Google services. We do get a customer support #, but all that means is someone answers the phone.

I'm not sure we've ever received actual support from them. We have trouble tickets for significant, documented issues that have been open for YEARS. The official answer is that someone from engineering will look into it and get back to us.

We're looking into ways to reduce our dependency on Google services, but of course it's a challenging and time-consuming endeavor to migrate away.

>Depends on what you mean by "access to support."

Weekly scheduled conference calls, and a specific agent assigned to our account with whom we had direct access.

In your blog post above, you repeatedly imply or directly state that we are its customers. I believe that's a huge error in your argument.

We are not Google's customers, we are Google's product. Google is an advertising business and we are the eyeballs it seeks. Android is merely meant as a pathway for those eyeballs. Same with Gmail, Youtube, etc.

Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.

No - this is not universally true.

e.g. Google Apps for Business is a PAID product that is not advertising supported.

The sales literature says "Count on our 24/7 customer support" - http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/benef...

Unfortunately, per my post above, customer support is basically every bit as lousy for customers of paid products as it is for users of free ones.

I agree when we're talking about Gmail & YouTube.

But when I'm paying Google several hundred pounds to buy a Nexus device, I think that I am a customer.

You are a customer for the hardware, but not the software or services, where you are again the product.

Google Play, however, has customer support.

http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=p...

Returning my Nexus 4 was a traumatic experience. It took over a month, with far too many emails and phone calls. Sadly, the customer support staff are probably trying their best, but the information and systems they have are completely inadequate.

I had the exact same experience. I emailed to return the nexus, did not get a response. I called them and they said they would set up a return, then I didn't hear anything. I called them again and they told me I past the deadline to return the tablet so they couldn't accept it. I then spent an hour arguing with them that I had started the return process before the deadline and that it was their lousy support that put us past the deadline.

Finally I just had to be obstinate and say "I want to speak to your manager." over and over and over again until I got to someone who knew how to look up my support ticket and see that I had started the return process before the deadline. Eventually they sent me the info I needed to return the device, but by that time I was so scared I would send it to them and then not get a refund that I chose to sell it instead.

Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.

LOL! :)

He talks about 1 billion people needing 10 minutes every 3 years would need 20,000 support people.

And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is financially self-hosting.

Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes plenty of profit.

The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees).

Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.

Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your argument.

The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.

Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.

Of course, they can spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be assuming they're doing that.

“Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes.”

Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash.

“Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.”

Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.

A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM, they are revenue/profit centers.

Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit.

Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.

By that reasoning, nobody should have customer support. Yet people do, because burning your customers is not a sustainable business practice. Support is not a profit center, but in the long term profits go down without it. If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.

I am talking about Google specifically rather than a hypothetical company that may need phone support to keep their customers.

If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.

People's other loyalty to google is that their service works pretty much perfectly. There is no free or even cost based product that I know of that beats gmail, google maps, google docs.

Before you list a bunch of startups no one outside of the tech community has heard of, remember that in order for the public to know about these products, those companies have to pay google to advertise. In addition to having to offer an insanely superior service, anyone entering the field must also know how to monetize which is challenging.

If a true competitor arises, they can be acquihired and integrated in to google which further limits google's need to spend millions of dollars a year on call centers.

The benefit would be being able to sleep at night.

>> you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project.

Sure. But you can spin up new projects - Google Glass, Google Fiber, etc etc, by spending your money building new teams instead of supporting existing products.

Again, I'm not saying they're right, but there is certainly an opportunity cost to providing support.

>> its budget is basically unlimited

Nobody's budget is unlimited. If nothing else, Google answers to shareholders.

>> The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.

Not necessarily. Even if Google hired 100 for Gmail, 100 for Adsense, 100 for Adwords they'd probably solve 80% of the problems, given that they'd notice that the algo went nuts on something. Then, there are different levels of support, the expensive ones would be in the single digit %.

Even if Google pushed employees to use their 20% on providing support things would improve drastically. Or less defending of their employer on HN and more customer service :) . "How do I press send on Gmail" and "How do I search" are easily solved via tutorials, the real problem is when you are locked out of your account by an algo.

>> Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.

Google is insanely profitable, their margins can do down a bit. Obviously everything costs money but at some point you lose your reputation trying to pinch your pennies. I do not remember many negative Google posts a few years ago. Now they are everywhere, meaning that their reputation is no longer unquestionable.

math0ne: congratulations on your 5th anniversary here on HN! Unfortunately, you've been hellbanned for almost as long. That’s too bad, since your comments are insightful.

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math0ne’s comment, a response to my assertion that not even advertisers get support from Google: “I just wanted to chime in and say that this is not totally true, at my work we have a direct google support contact for our advertising system. I have requested and received in depth support many time. I know you have to be a certain size to receive this though.”

That's the big difference between Google and say, Apple or Amazon. At other companies, this pressure would cause the formation of a new profit center. For Google, they see it as a quagmire of responsibilities.

If they wanted to pay 6k $ to each of these 20k support guy, they could ask for 6k*20k/(1 billion/3) = 36 cents per 10 minutes support !

Yes. Google charges you money only because they make it easier for you to host your email and have calendar, chat etc.

And on any given day hosting these things on your own is the best option out there but you might have to get your hands dirty or get it from a service provider who doesn't deny the existence of need for human interaction in customer service.

How do you feel about Google Fiber if this is how you feel Google treats its customers? When it comes to Google Fiber it seems like the whole community is incredibly excited, but many people also seem to hold the opinion that Google couldn't care less about its customers. I'm expecting Google Fiber to be an incredibly wonderful service, but do those who hold the opinion that Google "has total contempt" for its customers expect Google Fiber to be an awful service as well? Wouldn't that essentially defeat the purpose of Google Fiber?

I think Google devotes proportional resource to the products which give them value, and I think that's probably why Groups is being negelected. It is unfortunate for Groups users, but Google does have to make money.

Google Fiber offers plenty support options. http://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2457687?hl=en

Google Fibre isn't even on the radar for me. I'm in the UK and, as far as I can tell, it's only available to half-a-dozen people in the middle of nowhere.

If people are paying Google to be their ISP, I'd like an even higher level of customer support compared to the competition.

However, I'd expect it to be worse.

Google's explination is a terrible explanation. The assumption that everyone would need support, but that cannot be true. It is just an excuse with no reasoning behind it.

It's not an assumption, it's averaging, for every few people that wouldn't need support, there is one that would need support three or more times.

Isn't the fact that they are, by and large, getting away with not having any support at all proof that it wouldn't be such an overwhelming cost?

I've worked at a few companies where there were millions of customers, in every instance they've talked about how customer support is one of the biggest cost sinks in the company, and do everything possible to cut those costs. They will give employees one hour less than is required to give them benefits, then ask you to work overtime, they will reduce training from what was traditionally 1 month down to 5 days, they will move the call centre to whatever is cheapest and ultimately they will offshore the centre as much as possible. Google just went one logical step further and cut the cost (almost) completely.

I would think the fact that they are, by and large, getting away with not having any support, a great argument that they have made the right decision for now. If not having support is not impacting the bottom line what would their reasoning be for adding it.

No, logic doesn't work that way. Absence of X does not prove that X is cheap.

You know, in polite conversation "proof" usually doesn't mean "logical proof," the same way "or" usually means "exclusive or" rather than "inclusive or" as it does in formal logic. I mean evidence. Especially since we're talking about something so incredibly squishy and suppositional, nobody is going to be able to "prove" anything interesting in a formal capacity.

Generally, we consider a service being too expensive to be a good reason for a company not to offer that service. So not offering a service might be evidence that said service is too expensive to offer/operate. You can see this argument being made prominently in the Linode thread on the front page - someone complains that they don't offer a $10/month plan, and others point out it would be extremely expensive to support. Thus the lack of the $10/month plan is used as evidence that it is likely too expensive to offer.

You've gone the completely other way: you're saying the service not being offered is evidence that it is cheap. This is the opposite of the typical argument. So I'm reducing your idea here to its simplest logical form, trying to make it super clear to readers (and hopefully you) how ass-backwards it is.

My God you're unpleasant. You've completely restructured what I'm saying just so you can dump on it, and in the process you're doing a good job of convincing me I won't be able to formalize my argument sufficiently to please you. And I still care, for reasons I can't explain, to keep coming back for more. This will have to be the last one.

The Linode comparison doesn't hold at all. Linode have actual numbers to support their position. They are in a position to estimate the support costs, because they have other services they already have to support. Moreover, their product costs money and people expect that when they pay for something there will be support.

Google offers support for exactly one product (adwords). They have no basis for estimating the cost of support for a product like Google Groups. The argument that it will be expensive that you and others are putting forth is "Golly, support sure is expensive! You have to hire people and everything!" There's certainly reasons to expect that offering support might be expensive. But my entire point, which you seem intent on missing, is that they have been successful so far without offering any support at all, so why is it reasonable to expect that the demand for it will be so excessive that it would be financially untenable? Especially when people like the OP have suggested they would happily pay for it?

The other prong of your argument is that if it were tenable they would be doing it. I would argue that companies make good and bad decisions all the time. Looking to what they are currently doing with the assumption that it is the only right thing is a bit myopic. Companies miss opportunities and make mistakes all the time. That they're not doing it now is not evidence that it would be a mistake.

> Google offers support for exactly one product (adwords).

Since this a bald-faced lie, my unpleasantness is clearly warranted. You are clearly deriving arguments from a predetermined conclusion likely reached ages ago. At this point you apparently are trying to make inferences about demand without even trying to understand the existing supply, and the contortions you're going through to justify your existing beliefs are astonishing.

He's right, you are unpleasant. This is just ad hominem at this point.

When people don't argue in good faith, I think it's more important to make sure others following along see so and aren't misled by FUD and ignorance. I value that over being sensitive to the person who is participating in bad faith, as this user is.

Being pleasant and gentle to everyone is not the most important part of discourse, not even on HN.

As to the accusation of ad hominem: every single point I made was directed at - and based solely on - the arguments made by the other user. Once these arguments were ultimately found to be made in bad faith, I ended the discussion. That's not an ad hominem argument, that's ending an argument because of a negative evaluation of the other person's state of mind. Two very different things - almost unrelated, honestly.

I don't think he's literally saying it would be cheap. He's just saying that the fact that they can get away with not having support means not many people _require_ support, and therefore if support were made available theoretically not many people would take advantage of it.

Which I don't necessarily agree with, but I think the point is worth considering and not "ass-backwards" or completely illogical.

have you ever worked in support? The 2 minutes are not even enough to tell people that "this is the wrong hotline".

Once there is a Google support people will contact google and ask for help about anything on the web.

For many people Google is the web!!! IThere are peopple calling the ISPs support because "this site on your internet is broken". rJust imagine what would happen to google.

Back in the early 90's, we had a Mac only product that retailed for about $20. If a customer called in for support, in general, it meant that we made no profit on the product.

When we released a DOS / Windows 3.x version of the product at the same price, our sales shot up 10x the mac version - but the support calls we started getting usually ended up being support for DOS or Windows, not related to our product. So, effectively we were spending twice as much on support.

Of course, since we were selling so many more copies of the software, we still made money.

As a side effect, the support calls for the OS led us to develop quick scripts to get people back on their feet once we recognized the smell of their problem, which meant that they were more likely to buy our other software.

Customer loyalty is an intangible, but valuable asset, and is usually borne from direct customer interaction. When things go wrong, how is it handled?

If google did employ people to "fix the interwebz", I bet they'd find more customers for their paid services.

So far at least, all of Google's for-pay services are relatively niche/targeted at power users. I use Google products EXTREMELY heavily and I've never had occasion to consider a paid service of theirs. I think the overlap between "fix the interwebz" people and potential customers for paid services would be approximately zero.

It is possible however that what you're saying will open the door to charging for less niche services, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

At ISP contact centers, calls take 8 minutes on average. 75% of all customers never seek support, so average time spent on support is 2 minutes per customer.

I actually see this as an opportunity for Google to experiment with customer support. Seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for some basic level of support - so why not test that hypothesis ?

Setup a separate Customer Support organization for specific services. Staff with lower-skilled folks from cheaper locations (since cost seems to be such a huge concern). So a $X yearly plan entitles you to Y number of queries and gets you a response from customer support in N days.

For example a $20,000 per year engineer (very reasonable in lower cost locations) would require 2000 users paying 10 per year to breakeven.

The question is why would google even bother ?

Yes, self host anything that matters. I love free services from Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. but for things that matter like my email, my web sites, and my blog I spend a little money and time and control everything.

I prefer being a paying customer. If I should ever have a problem with Dropbox or Evernote I bet I get good support. And, I have my data backed up locally.

If there is demand of support (and there seems to be): why don't they sell support - let's say 100$ per hour (or more if they think this is too low)?

Google acts this way because they can. They are a popular SE from back when they were relatively honest and unbiased and they also buy traffic from Mozilla, iOS, Opera etc. They use that traffic to push down competitors and promote their services via Search completing the circle.

When they get some real competition they will be nicer to their users and consumers. If you want to advertise online in any meaningful way, you cannot ignore Google. They know that so they act as a monopolistic tyrant (also see At&T, Verizon, banks etc)

Comparing Google to other monopolists and mega-corps with bad customer service is unfair to the latter.

All of these companies still have a huge staff trying to give customer support. Google isn't even trying.

I see your point, but I also think you're giving too much credit to the latter: they care not for your well-being, and any notion of "customer service" is 100% in the spirit of retaining or generating revenue.

This is pretty much the argument for the other side of the coin. Google probably designed the service understanding that situations like these would arise and would represent a small but acceptable amount of outrage.

Altruistically for Google it's probably better to not have support for non-ads-monetization (as in, a product that isn't interfaced with buying advertisers) products.

edit: some clarification.

And maybe some of them should not have that huge staff actually and sell their product by lower price instead. I think that's a real opportunitity/niche these days and it will get bigger in a foreseable future.

Support != sales

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