Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting seeing Google as a grown up company, with many of the flaws they acquired early on still intact and at Google scale. You can be spending $100ks per monthon adwords and still not have a competent person to call when you need help. EVen if you do, they don't know much and can't do much. Realistically, it's not much better than an outsourced call centre and much worse than the far less profitable Big Ads platform.

When the Nexus 4 went live, they didn't have anywhere near the stock needed to match demand. If you now want to buy a current nexus phone or tablet, you have to be in a country where they allow purchase. They would deliver a much better customer experience (and sell many more phones) if they just let Amazon handle selling them. They even redirect you away to a sorry page and don't let you see the product page. It all feels very non-native to the internet experience and oddly insulting.

Google Wave, Hangouts, Play store (webapps, chrome apps, plugins & android apps) all have bad branding/clarity problems. People just don't understand what these things are, even when they really try. WTF is a hangout? Why does it want to have my SMSs go through it. What is a chrome app? I've heard salespeople in gadget shops assure buyers that any app on their android phone will also be available for their Chromebook. Google don't know how to create the necessary nouns and verbs people can use to understand what these things are. They have a serious tendency towards zombocoms.

This is just one more example.

This. Google needs one Jobsian hard-ass in charge of product marketing/quality to keep this swarm of ADD mayhem under control and set priorities.

Around Android 2.3 I was a huge fanboy because the platform had so much potential. Now? The platform still has so much potential, and I'm only a fan because it's an open-source platform with real consumer adoption - not because I think it's actually good. Microsoft shoveled a bunch of cash into the furnace and went from nothing to better in that time.

That isn't the Google way. The need someone tapping the right data on audience feedback, with the right internal priority to execute on solutions.

Because failing your customers is basically evil. We already have enough faceless companies.

Hanlon's Razor applies: it's not evil, it's incompetence. Specifically, it's lack of competence to apply discipline and make their hobby (Android) a reality.

It could be that they're afraid that mobile will subsume all other things at Google (look at how it's dominating at Apple), and make the company substantially different.

Just take away the ball pits, then they may get something done.

The impression I get is that they did get somebody in charge of strategy a few years ago; unfortunately the strategy he came up with was this daft nonsense about chasing Facebook of all things, which might explain why big chunks of their actual business are still floundering.

>You can be spending $100ks per monthon adwords and still not have a competent person to call when you need help.

We just got bit by this recently. One day our organic referrals just took a nosedive (4000 -> 1000 clicks/day overnight). We got in touch with our Adwords contact, who said they'd look into it, then ... left. No longer with the team. Now we have no contact and no way to figure out what went wrong and how we can fix it.

It didn't have a huge impact on us, but it did cost us ~$3k/month, which isn't negligible. The worst part is that there's seemingly no way for us to address this, despite spending a pretty significant amount of money on Adwords every month.

There is a very easy way to get support: https://support.google.com/adwords/

Theres a link to contact directly on this page.

Thanks for the link, but their response was to "check the product forums". I understand that they don't want to field calls from millions of site owners asking why they aren't ranked higher, but we spend probably $25k/month on Adwords. It'd be nice if they could give us a pointer to an actual person who could help us figure out what went wrong.

That was the response from the support line?

Also, you can always try the community

https://www.en.adwords-community.com/

Again, I appreciate your help. Yes, the Adwords rep I talked to on the phone said there was nobody who could help me figure out why our organic results tanked overnight, but that I could ask on the forums. I'm not prepared to do that at this time.

There were two changes that happened on the same day, at least one of which I'm sure is the cause: we pushed out a ton of pages we had generated from old data, and we had a regression whereby our international sites lost their canonical tags on links. It's pretty clearly our fault, but it would be nice to have someone spend 30s saying, "this is what triggered the issue; don't do this" rather than, "no we can't help you, maybe some random person on the Internet can".

As much as I love Google, they still try to act like are in the startup phase.

> If you now want to buy a current nexus phone or tablet, you have to be in a country where they allow purchase. They would deliver a much better customer experience (and sell many more phones) if they just let Amazon handle selling them.

Disclaimer: I'm lucky to be in a country (UK) with good Google coverage. That said, their customer experience for buying a phone online (nexus 4) is superb and far above amazons. Their website is clean, fast, and usable, and I've had no problems through it, whilst cancelling and re-ordering, tracking my orders etc. Friends who have used it have all had great experiences too.

The availability/country thing is an issue, and lack of phone support etc., but their online presence is fantastic.

They're following a 80/20 (or maybe 50/50) rule of thumb. If they can serve you easily they do. Otherwise, they can live without your purchase. They didn't have that much stock anyway. That makes sense in one way, but it feels disrespectful in other ways. If you live in Ireland (where Google's non US headquarters is and where the damn phones ship from), they give you an error message.

It's just one example though. In my opinion it's an example of below average competence. Equivalent to a bank website going down because of a traffic surge and taking 16 hours to come back. There are certain things that mature companies draw a line under. They don't just say 'we're not good at that.'

I can't speak to their corporate support but as a consumer I've had issues with two Nexus devices and called them for support. The first was fixed by a factory reset and the second meant I needed a RMA. Both times the person on the other end of the line somewhat immediately recognized that I didn't need to be instructed to "plug it in." They asked me what I'd done already and moved forwards from there without making me (pretend to) re-do steps I'd already taken. While it's pretty crappy that I've had issues out of the box with 2 out of my 4 Google devices, the tech support has been great.

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