You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.

Remember, over $1 BILLION dollars a quarter of free cash flow into their cash hoard EVERY QUARTER.

An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR.

Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.

In my personal experience NetApp support was excellent, but most of their customers were at least sane, computer literate, and able to communicate coherently. That situation does not obtain with the masses of Google users.

It's possible that Google could provide support, but they are also trying to create a reputation of providing infrastructure so reliable that the technology is simply finished and doesn't need support. They don't want to give the impression that they're giving up that battle.

I read a post like this every week. How can they possibly claim they’re winning the battle.

Who are their competitors for search, email, video, and cell phone?

I'll get comfortable.

Microsoft, Microsoft, TikTok, Apple

Google has something like 95%, 75%, 75% and 90% of each of those markets.

Even if that was completely correct it wouldn't apply to their paid services like Workspace, Google Fi, YouTube Premium, etc that also have no customer service whatsoever.

Any entity that can control an aspect of your life but doesn't give you the possibility to even talk to a human should not exist. I had to call the IRS today and with a little navigation cheat sheet, I found how to get ahold of someone with a 30 minute wait time. It sucked, but I spoke with a human that was very courteous. For a government agency, people dread it. But I at least have a ridiculous timeline to respond and can engage with a representative of the government. Google can virtually shut down your ability to access websites tied to an email, and now you're extraordinarily SOL without any recourse except for legal action. Not to mention they don't even tell you rules you violated if they give you the boot. Even the government today has to do that. But a private company? God forbid!

Agreed fully.

Except I believe that there’s a deeper cause here, the misalignment between the interests of the actual users and the company to whom the users aren’t actually a source of revenue except by numbers that can be shown to advertisers and investors. (Further down this goes to our expectation of free service; it was all fun and beta at first but it turned out to be a trap.)

Importantly, providing human service will address a symptom but not eliminate said misalignment—it’ll keep manifesting itself.

Simply put, especially in a 2FA worlds, emails need to be a right. Let's say you have a government account tied to your gmail account. Gmail locks you out. The government then tied your ssn to that email account. How do you sign up for the government account now that google has effectively prevented you from interacting with the government?

That kind of stuff needs to end. Email's are required to conduct business and interact with the govenrment nowadays. A private company should not be allowed to just remove your ability to interface with businesses online. My bank can't effectively steal all my money and close my accounts just because I have a personal viewpoint or hell, even committed a felony! But for some reason (especially redditors) people think it's okay for a private company to shut someone down entirely just because of some form of speech or whatever reason simply because it's a private entity.

Yeah, the problem isn't that Google offers a free no-support email option. That's a legit market segment.

The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.

(Former Googler here. There's no individual executive.)

People who comment on Google's lack of human support ignore the fact that it's a virus that's engulfed the whole online world. Almost every large company has automated chatbots, voice response systems, FAQs, and every imaginable way to avoid paying human beings who know things. And let's not even talk about whether they're empowered to actually do things for you.

Google could certainly lead and maybe the rest of the world would have to follow. Maybe.

It came from the founders and became culture. That + easy-metrics-only culture makes it a hill no other exec wants to die on.

I imagine this theoretical powerful individual is rewarded handsomely for the decrease in "labor costs" presented quarter to quarter

It would be very difficult to model a financial benefit of offering dedicated support for free products. If you pay for Google One (extra storage), you get access to phone support. I wonder if they would've been able to help in this situation of a locked account.

For what is worth, Drive as part of 'One' actually comes with support - I've been on live chat with them. They weren't super helpful overall but I was amazed I could get instant chat support in the first place from Google that I let it go.

It seems like you could offer phone support and provide it for a little above cost per month. At their scale it would almost immediately be efficient.

Sadly even some randsomware provides a phone number with useful tech support to help grandparents learn to purchase and transfer bitcoin. :/

That creates some weird incentive structures.

Counter productive? To what? Their market cap continues to climb. No one gives a shit about their customer support, or lack there of.

Oh they love their customers and are quite solicitous as to their needs.

People using search, gmail, drive etc aren’t the customers.

It's a pain in the arse to get AdSense support too!

Hey fellow Aussie wog, it’s different if you are Target or Amazon or Buzzfeed. The Internet battler..will ever struggle on.

(Fortunately I haven’t been called a wog to my face in decades)

It doesn't exactly have widespread support; it's more that nobody can propose a better solution that doesn't blow the budget completely out of the water.

Here's one - how about allowing you to pay to get official support if your account has been locked. And maybe even, god forbid, refund you if your complaint had merit.

I can see the claims now - "Google is holding my account ransom for $XX/hr of customer support!"

If they offered such a service people would accuse them of locking accounts to increase revenue.