If the company in the article successfully sued for the $5,000 they were being extorted over that wouldn't even matter. A few of those lawsuits wouldn't matter. A few thousand of those lawsuits wouldn't even matter.
The European Commission last year issued a massive lawsuit against Google Adsense of $1.6 billion [1]. Google marked that EC fine down in its SEC filings on page 86 of their 10-K [2]. European Commission fees constitute an effective tax of 1.0% in 2019, which they add to various other factors for a total tax rate of 13.3%. Page 89 shows that Google revenue was $160B, while expenses were $40B.
Google isn't moral, they don't see this fine as a mistake to be learned from. It's an operating expense. They won't change their tune unless it's more profitable to do so.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...
[2]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20200204_alphabet_10K.pd...
This is exactly how Microsoft grew evil.
When the complex system of people and laws and org charts and incentives and procedures that is the organism known as Google makes a decision, whether or not a particular decision is virtuous or not is insignificant.
Even if it was, trying to change their behavior through occasional social interaction is as unlikely to make Google provide good customer service as brushing your teeth without water is unlikely to fix California central valley aquifer depletion. There's a system that rewards Google with billions of dollars and a system that sprays water into the desert that you're fighting against. Ignoring that system, and advocating that people pour emotional effort into ineffective responses, is so unhelpful as to be counterproductive.
True but you can influence an organism by influencing its cells too. Think global, act local.
We live in a world where 99.9999999999999% of people are completely replaceable. Specially for a trillion dollar company.
Unfortunately that stance is naive in my opinion.
It's not that they couldn't replace them, it's just a lot cheaper to change some policies. If you're threatened with half your R&D staff walking out over some project in China, how hard is that decision, really?
Imho, the problem is that Googlers are paid a lot of money to not care, and that works pretty well.
I'm not sure about that. Google's crappy support is deeply, deeply embedded in their culture -- for all the benefits, it's one of the downsides of their PhD-heavy, engineering-first mentality, because engineers and academics loathe dealing with people, and to the extent that it's necessary for some system, regard that as a sign that system was improperly designed.
Google would need a major culture shift to start having good support, and unfortunately it's the exact kind of culture shift that would anger and alienate a lot of Googlers. Don't count on this changing anytime soon.