Google has a net income of well over 20% of revenue in their last quarterly earnings, even over 30% last March. This is ridiculously profitable. So I don't buy that argument at all.

And even if it's not economically viable to have customer support (or just a proper and timely process for appeals of AI decisions), then their business model probably shouldn't exist in its current form to begin with.

Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.

> Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there only about 100 companies who can afford Fortune 100-ish level support..............................................

It is still "free". You don't pay anything to use it.

> they do make a significant amount of money from each customer they can keep in the herd

No, they make a small amount of money from each customer. By far not enough to provide human 24/7 customer support.

> despite the fact that their income could more than support some basic customer service

If that's a fact I'm sure you'll be able to provide enough support to such a claim.

But let's do some basic math. Let's say that Gmail has 1B users, and each user will use customer support once every 2 years, and that each support ticket costs $10 to provide (I've heard similar numbers). Probably far more when you think about all the languages and products.

That's $5B in support per year. Which is 20% of their 2016 profit.

There you go, you can't have a free service and good customer support. Proven.

But hey, you're welcome to vote with your wallet and clicks, and move to another provider that gives free products with free, good, 24/7 human customer support.

Let me guess: you won't. Because there are none. Because it doesn't make any financial sense.

Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly

I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut down many of its services if they had to provide human support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness, would turn the the products from positive-margin or at least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-margin.

Ouch. I wish you the best but that statement makes me lose hope. Employees are expensive. Servers aren't exactly cheap either. And unexpected mistakes along theyl way cost a lot.

I suspect that Google knows this, and their reputation for have poor customer support and sales comes from that knowledge.

Why is it odd?

If you're on a free tier, you're not really a 'customer', just a user.

If you're a 'startup' you probably have funding. If not, you're not the sort of 'startup' that will fit in their calculations.

This should not be true and if it is, it’s just further indication of a problem.

I said 1 ten thousandth of cash on hand for 1.1 million years to drive home how much of a paradigm breaking amount of money they have.

They could make a blank rule that every app gets 20 years of maintenance and support and support 55,000 projects for 1/10000 of their budget.

Now realistically I feel your comment is still missing the point because it’s not even about saying they should maintain these apps anymore.

It’s about the fact that your hard earned dollar is a a drop in the bucket for them. Literally.

Imagine a bucket holding a bucket of water.

Imagine 1.5 million of these buckets back to back.

$1 of your money, is one drop in all 1.5 million of these jugs for Google.

Now pardon my visualizations here but I find it helps when you’re talking about such stupid amounts of money, to help put things into perspective.

They don’t care about services unless the returns are going to be astronomical in one dimension of another.

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Every service they make like a VC backed startup on their Series A... except they go and attach literally the biggest name in modern technology to it, which lulls people into a false sense of security and also expands the reach of these projects so that them shutting down affects many more people than an early stage product shutdown should.

This is what angers so many people

That cost is mostly imaginary. First, it’s already tiny - computers are cheap - and second, 90% of that cost is for stuff that only matters to Google; you could make that part disappear without hurting user experience.

> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?

How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ??

I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.

No, it isn't. Google wouldn't go out of business. I doubt that they'd even take a hit of a few percent in profit.

Who cares how many they start? They could start a million products per year, and that would not change the fact that depending on a Google service involves considerable risk.

I'm not sure why you're working so hard to defend this hill, but it would seem your local minima is within a deep crater.

The same way Amazon does? How about banks, airlines and other similar.

I understand that there's little motivation for some online services to improve their customer service experience but Google is especially bad. Even when making a purchase from them (an area where both Apple and Microsoft do much better), you're dealing with a bot with absolutely no other contact point.

If Google can't operate at scale, then maybe it just needs to be shut down so maybe someone who can will take their place.

Google simply doesn't WANT to operate at scale because that will impact profits.

I don't own Google stock but 0.1% of revenue would be a huge number that you just can't blink away. Especially when it is not a one-off whim I mean spectacular moonshot but rather an ongoing business obligation.

I hate that the service sucks but I'd rather they don't waste money like this.

Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?

Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally.

Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way.