Maybe that's a glimpse into the shitty future we're building for outselves: Judged by unexplainable results from machine learning decisions. No one except some machine is to blame and maybe their support could not even provide a useful explanation even if they cared. Maybe the pushbullet extension just used if-statements in a way that was a bit too close to how scammy extensions organize their code. </tinfoil-hat>

Is it really hard to understand? The answer is always money.

I'd add, an undue faith in The Algorithms.

Are there any examples of free services that don't directly make a company money that include great support? I am struggling to think of any.

Since when are G Suite and Pixel phones free products?

Fair enough. I was mainly talking about this specific instance. From what I have heard, the G Suite and Pixel phone support is bad, but it isn't downright non-existent like it was here.

google has chosen their pricing model tho. if it makes extensions a burden they should probably do something different

Money, sure, but it's power ahead of that. The average consumer cannot bargain.

insufficient and ineffective regulation. imagine if they were actually held to account

Always has been for 10+ years now.

As a former Call Center Director, it's pretty amazing to me how much bad-will these massive companies are willing to foment by not running their support correctly.

It's not that hard / expensive guys... you can hire great support employees for $20 / hour all across America.

Are these great $20/hr support engineers the kind I often deal with over email or phone, who usually employ canned responses, can’t solve off-script problems, tend to repeat the same unhelpful responses, and are sometimes indistinguishable from bots?

Those are $9.25 an hour support agents who are paid mostly to get you off the phone and take 70 calls a day.

Or their $10.25 an hour tier 3 "supervisors" who you might escalate the call to.

Look towards Shopify Support Gurus. Paid well, fully remote. As a Shopify Partner I deal with them a lot and have never had a bad experience; while some can't always answer my question, I always speak to a human (24/7 via live chat) and they direct my query in the right direction.

Support is also one of the most remote friendly forms of work available, and often benefits from spreading workers over multiple time zones.

Much of customer support is like the close doors button on an elevator. It doesn't actually do anything, but makes you feel like it does.

It's much more expensive than not having it.

Back of the napkin math for 1 billion users and a 1:100 support staff ratio comes out to around 5.8 billion dollars/yr.

This is developer support, not user support.

I know from an associate that their experience with GCP makes it seem like they aren’t able to handle the edge cases for customers. My associate tells me that GCP sales team will talk up all the capabilities, but when it comes time to move from a competing provider, it’s like a new road for them. Unforeseen outages because something that scaled well in AWS/Azure is not scaling as it should in GCP. Chalk it up to new learnings for the team, but having to reach out to GCP to fix or allow something that AWS/Azure already makes easy to do shouldn’t be difficult, or a surprise.