[assholesRppl2]

Yeah -- because when you provide a friendly, personal service for someone, you're doing it for the ad money and nothing else. Look, you have a point, but it's an extraordinarily cynical point. You're connecting the dots to reveal "the truth", that Google strives to make money, but it could honestly be a lot worse. Personalization is more than just ad money. It's friendly and great for business.

[toomuchtodo]

Wouldn't being friendly and great for business be providing customer support? Something that Google rarely, if ever, does?

Google is a product lab that happens to fund itself from its most successful experiment, ads.

[growse]

I've contacted Google for customer support twice in the last couple of years, and both times they were excellent. First time was when I had an issue with my Nexus 5, spoke to a human got it sorted straight away. Second time was when they changed the VAT status on personal Google Apps accounts (here in the UK). I raised a live chat to query this and had a callback from a guy on the west coast within 20 minutes who seemed happy to take the time to walk me through what was happening and what it meant.

Maybe I was just lucky. shrug

I'm skeptical about this whole "Google doesn't do customer support" thing, especially given the internet's astonishing ability to amplify vocal minorities and some people's desire to jump on anything anti-guy-making-all-the-money.