[re-thc]

> Do you just drop the customer? Well that's lost revenue, or an easy win for another company

Works for Google. Lots of their stuff has non-existent support even today.

At the end of the day it might cost more to acquire the customer than not.

[danpalmer]

This is a decision that companies can take, and some do (although I'd somewhat contest the google example, I've had good experiences before working here, and I'm biased of course).

I think the issue will come when companies start dropping customers that don't fit certain templates. They'll be accused of using racist or sexist AI, or something like that, and it'll be hard to defend against that because AI is a black box. With humans you can say "we have a policy against this", or "we'll retrain our employees", but that won't be possible for AI in the same way. Yes you can "retrain" an AI, but that retraining looks a lot less like a corporate education program, and a lot more like an IT change request, and surprise surprise, we're back to buying software systems.

[portaouflop]

> They'll be accused of using racist or sexist AI

I don’t see how that would be relevant from the companies perspective. Companies get accused of this and much worse all the time and it almost never has any real effect, happy to be corrected

[devnull3]

That is the reason AWS & Azure are much more successful when it comes to enterprise customers. This is where the real money is.

[bruce511]

Google drops users not customers. It's an important distinction.

Ok, they drop customers too, and even as a customer its gard to talk to a human. And that in itself is a huge barrier to entry to some possible customers.

Personally we use Google for ads. We pay them money, but don't get to talk to a human. They'd drop us if we behave in a way the algorithm doesn't like. They get away with this because there are very few alternatives.

But we don't use GCP. We use AWS, and talk to a human a couple times a year. And issues get fixed.

So yes, it works for Google, but only really in the space where they have a somewhat-monopoly.

In other spaces like Gmail or Google+, they happily drop users all the time because those are users, not customers.

[danpalmer]

FWIW, I used to use GCP and Workspace, used to talk to someone once or twice a year, had no problems with the support. I've also seen AWS drop the ball on security disclosures, so I think experiences between all of them can be pretty mixed.