Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up. We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am afraid in majority of Google's end users, this is true.
If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.
While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking.
I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.
It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition.
Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.
EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.
The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.
Their market cap is about 800 billion...I don't think 3 trillion dollar companies exist yet
No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.
To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less.
The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube.
IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
It's possible that was misleading or they've improved since then, I don't know. Your claim that they do have quality support for corporate accounts is an interesting point on the other side though.
More than that, I suspect.
I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower.
I imagine I am not alone.
It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money.
> their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions
Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google.
Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.