Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes plenty of profit.
The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees).
Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.
Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your argument.
The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.
Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.
Of course, they can spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be assuming they're doing that.
“Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes.”
Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash.
“Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.”
Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.
A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM, they are revenue/profit centers.
Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit.
Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.
By that reasoning, nobody should have customer support. Yet people do, because burning your customers is not a sustainable business practice. Support is not a profit center, but in the long term profits go down without it. If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.
I am talking about Google specifically rather than a hypothetical company that may need phone support to keep their customers.
If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.
People's other loyalty to google is that their service works pretty much perfectly. There is no free or even cost based product that I know of that beats gmail, google maps, google docs.
Before you list a bunch of startups no one outside of the tech community has heard of, remember that in order for the public to know about these products, those companies have to pay google to advertise. In addition to having to offer an insanely superior service, anyone entering the field must also know how to monetize which is challenging.
If a true competitor arises, they can be acquihired and integrated in to google which further limits google's need to spend millions of dollars a year on call centers.
>> you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project.
Sure. But you can spin up new projects - Google Glass, Google Fiber, etc etc, by spending your money building new teams instead of supporting existing products.
Again, I'm not saying they're right, but there is certainly an opportunity cost to providing support.
>> its budget is basically unlimited
Nobody's budget is unlimited. If nothing else, Google answers to shareholders.
>> The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.
Not necessarily. Even if Google hired 100 for Gmail, 100 for Adsense, 100 for Adwords they'd probably solve 80% of the problems, given that they'd notice that the algo went nuts on something. Then, there are different levels of support, the expensive ones would be in the single digit %.
Even if Google pushed employees to use their 20% on providing support things would improve drastically. Or less defending of their employer on HN and more customer service :) . "How do I press send on Gmail" and "How do I search" are easily solved via tutorials, the real problem is when you are locked out of your account by an algo.
>> Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.
Google is insanely profitable, their margins can do down a bit. Obviously everything costs money but at some point you lose your reputation trying to pinch your pennies. I do not remember many negative Google posts a few years ago. Now they are everywhere, meaning that their reputation is no longer unquestionable.
math0ne: congratulations on your 5th anniversary here on HN! Unfortunately, you've been hellbanned for almost as long. That’s too bad, since your comments are insightful.
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math0ne’s comment, a response to my assertion that not even advertisers get support from Google: “I just wanted to chime in and say that this is not totally true, at my work we have a direct google support contact for our advertising system. I have requested and received in depth support many time. I know you have to be a certain size to receive this though.”
The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees).
Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.