[ecdavis]

I read somewhere that Jeff Bezos considers it a bug in Amazon's customer service system when a customer has to get in contact with them.

My impression of Google is that they feel the same way, but haven't figured out how to gracefully handle the errors those bugs cause, while Amazon has.

I've never needed Google or Amazon's customer service, though, so I'm basing my opinion on what I've heard from others.

[powertower]

> Google is that they feel the same way, but haven't figured out how to gracefully handle the errors those bugs cause, while Amazon has

That's because Amazon sees you as the customer, while Google sees you as some type of a cheap-commodity/product to be sold (via click-throughs) to the real customers, the advertisers.

Google has burned many many people with their complete disregard towards us, including myself...

[bane]

It's a good point. Extending the analogy out a bit, Amazon has fantastic instrumenting that let's them see failures in their system, debuggers, memory inspectors, object lifetime inspectors etc.

while Google isn't even bothering to print most of their errors to the console. They have very little idea how their customer experience is other than sales numbers and they appear to pretty much ignore the few places they do directly interact with end users in their forums. The GAE pricing nonsense was one of the most insane customer interaction spectacles I've ever seen.

It's funny, about the only time we've ever seen any sort of input/output with Google has been here on HN with the few Google employees that haunt this forum, checking out problems this community is reporting.