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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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