| > Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support _AT ALL_. Frustrating? Yes. Surprising? No. Afaik, there isn't even any paid support for individual customers unless you have some sort of business account. I find this a bit unreasonable, but I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy). They can't be making many dollars per year per user. A single support call answered by a human would take years' worth of income from said user. I'm amazed at how many people do not realize this, and still rely on these "free" services even for their jobs. To give an example: recently, a popular blogger lost their Instagram account and it was sold to a 3rd party (because they had lots of followers, I suppose). Blogging is their day job and Instagram is a major source of readers for them, so they depend on it for their living. The account was probably stolen by using a reused password from some password dump and they didn't have 2FA enabled. In the end, the blogger got back their account because they were a part of a traditional media publishing organization which had a business account with Facebook, Inc and were able to escalate it that way. Had they not had this account, it would have been lost. There are lots and lots of professions where social media presence is required to bring in the customers (e.g. woodworkers these days depend on Instagram!) or even monetization from their account directly. If you depend on Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc to earn a living, you should consider a business account or at least do your best to secure the account (2FA, no password reuse, etc). |
In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they see the strategic value of that choice (never running a support org) as outweighing the tactical pain.
Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then something is broken and we should just fix it."
Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:
(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.
(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users, you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because {insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."