Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. The reason tech companies sit all at the top of most valuable companies is essentially because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees.

The only way to fix this is to legally require it, because nobody's going to stop the profit train by themselves.

>because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees

Or they've simply removed those tasks under the rubric of automation.

> Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why.

That's not correct. Google is more profitable because it is a monopoly and routinely engages in illegal anti-competitive behavior.

It's precisely because this is the case that it's able to have nonexistent customer service and stay in business.

Ahh yes, Google the bastion of unethical business practices in comparison to.... checks notes banks....

Well, yeah. Bankers would go to jail [1] for the kind of market manipulation google does on ad markets [2]. The realization may not have dawned on our industry yet, but the abuses big tech is currently into are the kind that gave banks their reputation, and also their regulation.

[1] e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36737666

[2] among others: https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blu...

In both cases the organizations would eventually descend into using the skin of newborn infants for making snack food if they thought it would make them an extra dollar.

Which is why both need aggressive regulation.

They're not as evil as e.g. Goldman Sachs, but they're significantly more evil than several local banks that I actually use.

> The only way to fix this is to legally require it, because nobody's going to stop the profit train by themselves.

I don't know what Google's rates of customer service failures actually are, but even a minuscule of rate of horror stories seems to hurt brand, judging from HN comments.

I wonder whether fixing half of, say, 0.00000001% of cases that would otherwise be PR horror stories, could translate into measurable boost to brand value.

Maybe all the math has already been done, and all possible wins for creative automation motivated by business payoff (and promo bids) have already been achieved, or maybe not.

> Maybe all the math has already been done,

I doubt it. Brand value is a notoriously fuzzy concept, and corporate decision-making features a heavy measurement bias. A toxic brand might be measurable by the time it's influencing enough purchaser decisions to show up on "would you consider?" surveys, but that's an advanced stage of the problem.

Good points.

And even if they have a human customer department that you are able to track down it's just some student at a callcenter.

> this kind of overautomation is rife

I've never worked with or for Google, but having worked for software companies my whole life, I suspect that it's overautomation, combined with "silo-ing". Even if somebody identifies the problem from the user's perspective, it becomes a rats nest of responsibilities to untangle to figure out who or what group(s) can address it and how. The people who actually understand how a particular component works and can change it are limited to their particular component and the people who are nominally in charge of "everything" have no detailed visibility into anything at all.

There's also folks that justify their behavior and choices based on the size of their paychecks. As long as they get big numbers it doesn't matter if others lose their livelihoods arbitrarily and without recourse.