On the other hand, the Google employee who has answered here is Matt Cutts. I doubt many lesser-known employees at Google have the luxury of replying outside of official company forums and sites in such a manner.

From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).

FWIW, I've seen "lesser-known" Google employees get people in touch with the right teams.

I'm not saying the poster is necessarily faking, but how should we know that someone who chose the name MattCutts is the Matt Cutts he claims to be? Do we assume he's not an impersonator because we like his answer? This comment is the very first activity on that account.

I like the way you think! I tweeted to you to prove this account is really me: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/3603379916

And of course anybody who hacked your HN account couldn't possibly have hacked your Twitter account (assuming they are both really u, and u'r the Google Matt Cubbs). :=)

"You'd never see an Apple employee posting on a thread about someone whose iPhone app had been sitting in the pipeline for months"

No, but you might get a call from Phil Schiller.

Startup idea: hack customer service into a product that scales.

The difference is that Apple is just being Apple while they try to figure out how to handle the App Store. I'm not saying it is right, but there's a certain intelligence and style behind the way Apple ignores people.

Google, on the other hand, is just incompetent.

(And PayPal is, too, but they seem to be slowly learning.)

I disagree. Google is just being Google. They've always been a company that does very cool (and non-evil) projects, but doesn't really bend over backwards to listen to customers. I always get the impression that they're too busy working on their latest game-changing scheme to be bothered with little details like keeping customers happy.

Not bending over backwards for customers is the action of an incompetent company. Whether by choice or not.

under which definition Apple is not just being Apple but is incompetent since they are doing the same thing you point to Google as doing. You can't have it one way for Apple and another for Google.

I'd wager that he's offering to help not because Google is such a friendly and benevolent business entity, but because it's in the spirit of Hacker News (and ultimately, in Google's best interest to do so).

The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.

I fail to see how this is "evil". The evil one worries about in context of a company like Google is information privacy.

Google and PayPal both fall into the category of not putting enough profits into customer support.

This is what most fear from market consolidation and extremely large companies. They squeeze more profits from doing things that a company without monopoly-like characteristics could not get away with. To me, when you cross this line, you have become evil.

fyi, I spent more than 2 hours last night getting my PayPal personal account unlocked. It was an awful web and phone customer support and terrible security practices.

It's great to see this discussion here and especially to have Matt Cutts weighing in.

It does seem like this is an endemic problem in Google and comes right from the top. Some startups focus on customer service and use it as a differentiator. Others focus on product and believe they can build their way out of support.

Google is and always has been in the second category. The mindset is from what I understand firmly held by Larry and Sergey and manifests itself through the whole company. Until they change, it seems unlikely the support teams will change.

Yes, this does seem to be a top-down problem and not a result of incompetence.

I'm guessing they won't change until they see their profits effected. As to PayPal, I have chosen other providers. So I only have to deal with them if some vendor only accepts PayPal and I really want to use that vendor.

As for Google, for now, I don't need to serve up ads. If and when I do, I will spend time to see if alternate ad brokers can give me equal or better returns. Google knows that their hold on the ad market stays as long as buyers and publishers do not move in sync. That is, its very hard for a publisher to use a different brokerage when all the buyers feel they need to use Google (and vice verse). This movement is probably best done by market segment. Specialty brokers ("we only do blogs", "we do sports very well", etc) should be the ones to disrupt this space. I guess this is already being done, but it certainly isn't happening fast enough. Ideas?

This comment is obviously an utter and complete waste of space, but I couldn't resist pointing out the irony of someone called "lucifer" failing to see how something is evil.

Irony? Denying that something is evil seems pretty typical for the referent of that symbol.

Actually, the root meaning of the name is 'Light', from which one can arrive at the notion of 'Sight' So what is really ironic is that any sentient would deny their inner lucifer and presume for itself an objective view of truth ...

Avoiding this discussion was why I danced around the name issue by pointing to its referent.