This is off topic but it reminds me, every time I look for some Windows 10 problem, it mostly leads to some Microsoft forum (answers.microsoft.com). In there however, the questions systematically get answered by a billion "MSFT specialist consultants #not working for MSFT", and it always weirds me out. Are these people there for self promotion, for the thrill of it or is it MSFT that has some reward system for third parties to participate? I know helpful strangers is nothing new to the internet, I guess I'm just weirded out because there's never an official answer on MSFT's official forum and these sorts of questions are not really the sort of "playful" puzzles one might encounter helping strangers on SO/Reddit/Discord.

They also seem to just skim read questions for keywords and give you canned solutions for problems they already know how to fix. If your problem is either new or something that's not actually fixable the thread turns in to a back and forth of them clearly not actually comprehending that and you restating your issue in different ways in futility.

It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.

Or they'll ask for rafts of info that anyone paying attention can see is unrelated. Those posts, I always imagine them ending with "heh heh, THAT should keep Batman & Robin busy for a while! mwa ha ha, ha HA HA HA HA HAAA!"

It's the same on the Apple discussion boards. You won't ever get an official answer, only a guess of an answer from somebody with no more knowledge than yourself.

HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.

My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.

And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.

Maybe Apple consumer forums, but I’ve had amazing support from the developer forums. Especially Quinn “the Eskimo” ... saves my butt every 6 months it seems, and isn’t the least bit offended when my questions relate to an opaque electron code signing issue. Seriously, bless this person for doing the “lord’s work.”

He's been doing it since the late 90s too... I still remember getting an answer from him regarding a dusty corner of the Mac OS 8 internet config API when I was trying to bulk provision Macs for campus internet access in 1998. It was all mailing lists then.

Ditto for the same person and similar reasons (code signing and notarization).

And the guess of an answer they give is always the same:

1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)

2. Have you reset your PRAM?

3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.

And don't forget the mandatory "reset your SMC"

Real answer they don’t want to give.

   “Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”

Big-vendor hardware: Sure it costs 1.5-2.0x as much as white-box equipment, but you're paying for the support!

... later...

"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"

"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"

Honestly, that last line reads exactly like something from BOFH[0], right before he gets the PFY to commit some heinous act of domestic terrorism on the unsuspecting enterprise support salesman. Some things apparently never change.

[0]https://www.theregister.com/data_centre/bofh/

Apple's discussion boards are useless, but at least they have actual phone and email channels to get an answer from an employee (usually). And Apple doesn't generally charge for the phone call itself (they will charge for out-of-warranty hardware work, but generally don't for software support even out of warranty).

With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.

The Apple communities are next to useless, especially when it's a design flaw; butterfly keyboard. You practically have to sue companies like Apple to get them to take notice.

Google support forums are the same, the "product experts" who write most of the answers don't work for Google and are limited in their ability to escalate things.

In the '90's I had a mission that I carried out by offering answers to questions on CompuServe fora pertaining to Windows. In 1996 Microsoft decided to embrace and extend this by offering perks to the people who were most active. That program has been revised and renamed over the years. I wouldn't say that I succeeded in my mission, but I would say I don't feel I need to do such things personally. The people you are pointing out seem to need to offer you a solution, however off-point, and need you to accept it formally if you indeed find it to be a solution, and I speculate, seem to be paid and possibly try to make a living doing it now. A possible explanation is that Microsoft doesn't want to be obligated to provide online support any more than Google does. But they want to indeed offer online support for the time being, as casually as possible, and they are regulating some people by measuring some aspects of the support activities of some people.

Getting Microsoft MVP is based, in part, on community involvement. This is one way to show community engagement.

Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.

And maybe this has changed, but I think the Microsoft support forum used to show the "accepted" answer twice, once in the thread and once in the accepted answer section. Or something similar; whatever it was I felt like I was reading the same thing twice.

Are the people that answering questions on that support forum actually google employees? I got this impression that google employees never post on that forum and the people that answer are just unpaid forum members which somehow take it upon themselves to post answers.

I bet you're right.

Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"

I like reading Q&A on Amazon listings, because lots of people answer "I have no idea" or similar. I've only received a few of the email prompts for these things, but as I recall they almost make it sound like some potential shopper has decided to ask YOU, specifically YOU, about a particular product feature.

The amazon ones are truly amazing. I have wondered for years who is answering those. I had thought that questions were routed to previous buyers somehow, but that's never happened for me...

Oh that reminds me of a funny story. I used to work for a company that sold various software and one month after their purchase, they'd get an email asking if they would like to review the product. If they ignored that, after another month they'd get one more email asking if they would like to review the product (after that they'd get no more emails).

Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.

I've received a few email notifications for amazon products. They seems to be sent for new questions when you previously purchased the product (not necessarily received it yet).

Most of the answers are so useless or plainly bad. That's why I try as much as possible to answer questions for products I've bought.

I love seeing those amazon q and a sections, full of brilliance. Q "Will this fit my laptop" A "I don't know"

The difference is that the hotel didn't create, own or manage the forum.

Looks like the answer is no: https://support.google.com/communities/answer/9138806?hl=en

> When you become an expert, you'll get exclusive program perks, like special badges in the Google Help Communities, direct access to Google employees to provide product feedback and a chance to test Google products before they're released.

So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.

Sounds like a great opportunity for Box and Dropbox to provided helpful forum answers about alternatives to Google Drive. Knowing Google they are probably training bots on these forum answers so the Google bots themselves might start recommending competitor products.

I am member of one of these programs, and it's not worth it once you get everything unlocked. At best you get invited to HQ, but that's it.

Likely outsourced. Google doesn't seem to put much effort into any support mechanisms, so I would presume the same for technical support.

Isn't being strict about what features you add the core of good product management? (Doesn't apply to bugs I guess.)

Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.

No. The core of good product management is making decisions that make your product so attractive to users that they get their friends and coworkers to use it, too.

Sometimes that means minimalism. Sometimes it means that you have ease of use. Sometimes you realize that your users are actually not your customers, and you need to make the product attractive to the customers, not the users. That way lies madness and enterprise sales.

If a bunch of people are asking for a bunch of features it sounds like they have made their product attractive to users.

Not necessarily. There was a time there were few players in the SaaS office collaboration suites, so the default was google apps. Now that other alternatives exist people might be asking for some of the features offered by others.

Not really. There may be conflicting demands from customers that have to be dealt with, and conflicts between those customers and the realities of software development, but you generally need to offer the features that customers need to get their job done. In particularly bad cases, the failure to deliver may effectively dictate corporate and government policies. (Yes, I have lived through that.)

At a less dire level, it also affects the ability to acquire and retain customers. If a product does not offer the features a person needs or fails to reflect how they use it, the product becomes more trouble than it is worth. Compare Google's and Microsoft's office productivity applications. There are many things that you simply cannot do with Google's product that are addressed by Microsoft's product, or even in the often criticized LibreOffice.

Google products are more likely to be suddenly deprecated with no offboarding plan than to care what features an overwhelming majority of customers want.

Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.