[Osiris]

"Support costs" calculation often doesn't include the costs of not having support.

When I worked at GoDaddy, there were around 2/3 of the company was customer support.

At the current company I'm at, a cryptocurrency exchange, our support agents frequently hear they prefer our service over others because of our fast support response times (crypto exchanges are notorious for really poor support).

All of my interactions with Amazon support have been resolved to my satisfaction within 10 minutes or less.

Companies really ought to do the math on the value that comes from providing fast, timely, and easy (don't have to fight with them) customer support.

Google hasn't learned this lesson.

[onion2k]

Google hasn't learned this lesson.

They have though; they've just drawn the conclusion that they'd rather put massive amounts of effort in to building services that users can use without needing support. This approach works well once the problems have been ironed out, but it's horrible until that's the case. Google's mature products like Ads, Docs, GMail, etc are amazing. Their new products ... aren't.

[manigandham]

There's a big difference between SaaS applications and compute infrastructure for your business.

Google Ads and such also have a terrible support reputation, even with clients spending 8 figures.

[marcinzm]

>Google's mature products like Ads, Docs, GMail, etc are amazing.

Until something goes wrong and the only recourse is to post an angry Hacker News thread or call up people you personally know at Google to get it fixed. For example https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/that-time-i-got-locked-out....

[QuantumGood]

I've seen Google projects where the project lead explained (actually responded) that they don't want to provide support, end of story. Google puts folks in charge but does not give them enough in the way accountability objectives.