| They way I look at it, Google treats support in the same way that Amazon treats APIs. 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}." |
If the EU ever gets around to forcing Google to support their users regardless of how they are enriching Google the moral of the story will be they saved billions by waiting until litigation. Just like taxes.