Remember: We're not Google's clients, we're Google's products
Calling someone a "product" is a great way to make a flippant jab at a company but as far as a product is something a company produces, it's just not the case.
Google, like these other companies, produces useful (to many at least) services. The way they make money on this is by selling ad space or access to my eyeballs and earholes. So to claim that users are simply "product" is misleading at best. Their "product" for me is webmail, search, navigation, and file hosting. Their "product" for other companies is space where they can reach potential customers.
So in this sense, like countless other media and information companies, access is one of their products and information services make up their other products.
Well, yes you are. Some years ago, a CEO of french television said that his business was to sell "available brain time" to advertisers.
To sell to advertisers Google has to get people to use its search engine and other products. To do that it has to treat users like customers in that it would rather have them be happy than not happy, at least unless it costs them too much. This is precisely the relationship that other businesses have with their traditional, simple customers.
> You're not Google's product, you're their supplier; one of their many millions of suppliers.
Their product is your personal information, which you supply to them in exchange for their services. The fact that you are one of many millions of suppliers (each dealing in microtransactions) means you don't have a lot of weight when you need to get help from them.
The best counter to the lazy Google meme is to think of all the companies where you are indisputably the customer and you also get awful incompetent support.
Pointing out that Google has little incentive to support it's users in a post about getting little support from Google seems very on-topic (but perhaps unoriginal) to me.