I think it's interesting to note that Google seems to come up much more often for Kafkaesque customer support problems.

That's not a rigorous scientific statement, but it's fairly consistent with my own experience dealing with Google as a startup. Unless you have a back channel via an employee you know, it's next to impossible to get any non-automated, human judgement on your situation.

The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?

> The part I don't get is... where in Google leadership does this issue get lost on the company's priorities? Of all of the rational explanations I can come up with, it feels like someone looks at the data and either says "nah we don't lose much money from this" or "nah it's not a real problem". Is that actually true?

Could it be something to do with company culture? Something like "if we solve a hard problem by assigning a human to it then we have admitted failure as a technology company". It's a lofty goal but it comes at the cost of betraying the trust of partners/customers when things break, and they seem to break often. Someone in management really ought to be weighing those two things side by side (assuming the cultural thing I mentioned even exists).

Human-based support at Google-scale is also insanely expensive.

If they weren't taking mone from each of their app developers, that might be an argument. But when you are making Google scale profits, which are INSANELY high, than you can afford the humans to provide support.

And if you don't, than your monopoly should be broken by the government. And Apple's high end garden barely scratches Google's monopoly.

It's not that black and white. There's "no support", "lots of support", and somewhere in between is "more than what Google has right now."

I think that, when you are the gatekeepers to some people's livelihoods, there's some amount of ethical responsibility to exercise judgement. If you can automate judgement, then great, but if you can't, you should probably implement it with humans.

Do you think it would cost them more than it costs AT&T or Comcast, who don't have $100 billion in savings between them but do offer phone support to about 200 million people?

What happens if Google provides support is their average revenue per employee drops from $1.3m to an even million per year or whatever and their profit margins remain immense and that $100b+ in the bank keeps on growing. But it is certainly more expensive than an auto-emailer faking support.

Apple support is legendary and they're pretty big

I think what a lot of people forget or don't appreciate is the sheer scale of FAANG companies and what they deal with on a regular basis.

People complain about how they can't talk to a human being about their one specific issue. These companies are not mom and pop stores dealing with a handful of suppliers, just sitting there waiting for their phone to ring - they're huge businesses operating in hundreds of countries 24/7/365 handling probably millions of interactions with "customers"/suppliers every year with all sorts of different processes and policies in different jurisdictions.

On Hacker news we hear about someone falling through the cracks in the system every couple of weeks, but we don't hear about all of the bad actors/viruses/malware getting blocked/removed from the app stores or cloud vendors everyday

There are people out there whose strategy is "throw enough shit and something will stick" who are trying their hardest to publish their malware as much as possible every single day and it's (IMHO) frankly something of a success/miracle that we've not seen any more major abuses of the app stores and cloud platforms.

People on HN complain bitterly about the potential for ad networks to distribute malware, but then get mad when FAANGs ban accounts that are linked to bad actors. Sure it is sad that some people are innocently caught in the crossfire but what are the FAANGs to do? Damned if they do, damned if they don't?

The economies of scale say that the larger companies can better afford to hire representatives per client tahn the mom and pop stores can. If Google were to have as much staff - proportional to their amount of products [ie apps that they are making money off of] - as a mom and pop store did, we'd be fine. In fact, if they had even a thousandth of that, we'd be fine.

What I find crazy is that they do this same thing on YouTube too for accounts with fairly large subscriber bases.

1. I remember when it was in style to be a Google fanboi. Those days have gone as Google became more evil.

2. I had two GMail accounts closed on me for no obvious reason. Both were eventually reopened, but one several years later because I got enough media attention to get their attention.

3. I know one company that lost all their mails because their paid App Engine account was closed on them. I know another company which lost its biggest customer when the CEO's personal Gmail account was suddenly closed. And I know two other people who has lost access to all the stuff on Drive.

Considering that each problem is a real disaster for the person experiencing it, and that you don't hear about such stories with Microsoft, Apple or even Amazon.

The fact is, that even though you only hear the horror stories, there shouldn't be so many of them that you here them all over. I am just one person, and I trust Google as much as I trust the Chinese government.