I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.

To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.

That is mostly not the case with Google as it usually ends up in a situation where I am meeting a group of their lawyers instead.

AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.

They refused to extend my trial at all while we were getting it sorted out.

I left Gsuite and immediately received much better support from Office 365. I left them for other reasons. I also get good support from Zoho and Fastmail.

Google has been the worst by far.

Try getting support for anything that's not G Suite or Project Fi (which have arguably good customer support). Sometimes the "support" is just a link to the forums.

I'm no expert, but maybe it's the free-to-use products that lack support.

Suppose there were a paid mail service, and another free one with a billion users, and the paid service's spam filtering relied on the free one for accuracy. (Spammers can't very well spam a hundred thousand people without hitting at least a few thousand of the billion.) Would you say that the users of the free one pay with data? They do, but to me, the phrase "paid with data" suggests other data than just the spam you get and whether you click "this is spam" on a particular message.

Of course. With G Suite, you are the customer.

On YouTube, you are not the customer. You are the product, whether you're a viewer or a creator. Advertisers are the customer.

I think that Youtube is in a different situation in that their creators are mostly individuals who use Youtube because it affords them advantages that they can't get elsewhere. If that were to change, either with Youtube becoming less popular or another platform becoming good enough, Youtube would lose a lot of its video makers and that would lose them a lot of business. I don't think Youtube's problem is that they see creators as products so much as that in order to maintain their market position, they have to be all things to all people and they desperately want to automate their business. That means there's not going to be any policy that works for everyone that uses Youtube and no matter what they do, somebody is going to get screwed.

If something bad happens on their side and it does happens eventually, they must fix the problem by manually editing the system. If they don't allocate human resource for that task or their system is hard to edit by hand, they don't provide the support.

If 90% of you customers are phoning to complain the service is down and they can't reboot the modem because the lights are turned off because of the power cut, you can't have skilled support engineers dealing with them. Setting aside the money, the engineers would just go stir crazy and turn into BOFHs.

The trick is to either vet your customers, or enable a shibboleet protocol

How do you propose filtering out the tech savvy vs. unsavvy folks needing support? I think a big problem with "tiered support" (shudder) is that the support folks on the 1st level are often less tech savvy than the people who actually need something fixed... but they deal with so many customers who don't actually have an issue to report that it makes it worthwhile.

Oh, the restart fixed youtube.com for you? Great! Have a wonderful day.

I'm not at all surprised that Youtube support is so rubbish though. The interesting thing is, if they had better support they wouldn't be in such a disastrous position now.