Hacker News Reader

Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't worry about either for a couple of reasons.

Google has the worst customer service ever. When they come into your market, all you have to is hammer their customer service, in advertising if necessary. If you have great customer service, nobody will take a chance with them because their track record of customer service is so horrendous and well documented.

With Amazon, as stated in the article, it's not their niche. As soon as they started in your market, start running promotions for discounts for Amazon Prime customers. Pretty sure once they can't sustain their growth, they'll bail out of your markets.

Both companies have fatal flaws and are just being opportunistic. If this guy hangs in there, it won't take much to deal with them properly.

View on HN

I fully agree with your point about Google's customer service, especially in this market where it's so important. But I think there's good reason to be worried about Amazon. Amazon doesn't have a niche, they want to be everything to everybody. Which Google does too, but Amazon actually has a history of actually succeeding in markets that are outside their core business of ecommerce. AWS is the biggest example but Mechanical Turk, Prime video streaming and their app store are all serious competitors in their respective niches. The jury is still out on their music offering.

I also have had great experience with google customer service there was nearly no wait time and they replaced my phone for free after I broke it through a method entirely my own doing and was calling about mailing it in for a repair.

I think that's an optimistic view. If their scale means that they can offer the same product at half the price, people are going to be very forgiving of customer service snafus.

Half price is optimistic. It's more likely to be free.

Part of the point of the article, and a very good point, I think, is that this type of service really doesn't scale well. Trust and service are more important than the absolute lowest price in the market they're in, and being a huge company and having huge scale just doesn't help you that much with those things.

How on earth are they going to do it for "half price"? These are already very competitive industries where the pricing is largely based on time (and estimations thereof). And the estimating is based on stuff that's going to be hard to capture in an algorithm that doesn't involve a physical person going to $wherever and punching in a bunch of estimates of various things into a web form for processing. At which point your algorithm isn't a tremendous advantage since the trip cost is what dominates the equation, not if it takes the estimator 5 minutes or 15 minutes to come up with a price.

The only way it might succeed is if Google or Amazon can squeeze people harder than Homejoy or whoever already does. And that's a recipe for disaster, no matter if they're employees or independent contractors. If people can't make a living through your service, they simply won't participate.

Google used to have a very bad reputation about customer service, but in the last 2-3 years they focused on fixing some of these problems. I can't really say they are bad anymore, at least they are in the average, for some products they are excellent. That's my experience.

I personally don't see that Google has bad customer service. I own a Nexus 5 (twice RMA'd) and a Nexus 6 and I've never had a problem with them. In fact I only use the GChat version of interaction too!

google and apple have the position microsoft had in the 90s

They have the platform and the browser.

Much worse than either of them blocking your competing app from their store, is them providing a half assed version of your product by default on their OS.

just see how many people installed firefox, or a contact manager, or email client.

even in this crowd, i'd bet the numbers are very low.

I agree that competing with those guys is incredibly hard, because of their huge advantage. On the other hand... IE lost the browser wars. Is it such a good example?

Edit: See comments. IE is still going strong.

IE may not seem to have much mindshare as far as where the web is going, but last stats I saw say that it's still comfortably over 50% of the desktop browser market.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/window...

Many people fall prey to well engineered propaganda. Example, Jobs pronounces PC dead. Media picks it up. People believe it because Jobs and media says so. Media constantly announce some random percentage decline in yearly shipments but fail to mention that the absolute numbers still out number tablets by a crazy margin.

Same story with IE. I use chrome exclusively. My friends, coworkers and family members do the same. People in conferences use chrome too. So I believe IE is "dead." Catch my drift?

Well holy crap, right you are. My point is refuted.

I will ignore this article as it uses a lousy source and even the reporter does not put much credibility on their sampling methodologies to the point he calls it out on the article introduction.

but regardless, it is offtopic.

IE didn't lose. Google won.

google sued, had more money, leverage, and won.

but it now being on the other side, also means they know how to not let anybody else win like they did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com