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by shawnz 2617 days ago
> I'm not interested in hearing about how that's a hackneyed worn-out cliché

Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers and that's why they need adequate customer support. The fact that you pay for the product with ad impressions rather than dollars doesn't change anything about that dynamic.
1 comments
CamperBob2 2617 days ago
Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers

No, that's what makes them "users." The customers are the advertisers who actually pay money to Google. You can rest assured that they don't have to post a cri de coeur on social media to get a response from Google when something goes wrong.

IMO, a company that does its level best to act like vital public infrastructure needs to be held to standards appropriate to vital public infrastructure. If that's a controversial point of view, then so be it.

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shawnz 2617 days ago
> No, that's what makes them "users." The customers are the advertisers who actually pay money to Google.

I understand your idea. But in my opinion this is a useless and unconventional definition of the word 'customer'. The customer is the one who receives a service in exchange for compensation. In this case the service is gmail and the compensation is ad impressions. The fact that Google can sell those ad impressions is secondary to that dynamic. If there were no users willing to provide that compensation in exchange for access to gmail, then there'd be no product, and there'd be no secondary market for selling those advertisements. Meanwhile even with no advertisers there would still be a product, and there would still be other avenues for monetizing it.

> You can rest assured that they don't have to post a cri de coeur on social media to get a response from Google when something goes wrong.

Are you sure about that? A quick google for "adwords support experiences" gives quite a number of telling stories to the contrary. Besides, there are several orders of magnitude more users than there are advertisers, so obviously it's going to be much easier for users' issues to get lost in the noise. And obviously no advertising agencies are going to be getting any sympathy by complaining on Twitter.

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