Comment by 4chandaily
11 hours ago
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
> Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
I think part of what makes a utility a utility is that the nature of the service is naturally a monopoly. For example, you can only realistically have one set of waterways, so the company providing tap water as a service is a utility. Same with power lines, you can only realistically have one set, so the electricity-supplying company is a utility. With phone/internet service, I imagine that also requires sharing infrastructure.
Google doesn't fit in that paradigm. The nature of their services don't naturally require sharing resources to compete. They a monopoly simply because they amassed a ton a money to do things that other people can't, like drive on all roads on Earth with special cameras, or host however many videos there are on YouTube, serving those videos throughout the world, and even pay livable wages to the creators of the videos.
it doesnt need to be a utility. they just need to crack down on every attempt google uses to kill the competition.
There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.
e.g.
- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.
- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.
- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it (apple, graphene)
- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.
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While I agree with where you're coming from, I think you're overstating it just a little. It only seems like something that should be considered a public utility because Google has anticompetitively bundled what should be several distinct types of products together as one take-it-or-leave-it package. Android (really Google Play Services) should not be tied to the Play Store App (think how MS was forced to include a browser choice screen in the EU). Likewise the Play Store Curation/Hosting Service should not be tied to the Play Store App (ie Aurora store etc should work and be fully supported by Play Store Curation/Hosting Service through the Service having a well-documented open API). Then Play Store Curation/Hosting Service would have to compete on its own merits, rather than anticompetitive tying with two instances of Metcalfe's law (Android users plus app developers).
Nothing has been captured, any more than a company inventing anything has "captured" it.
And there are other companies: Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, K Telecom T-Store, Jio, MTN Play.
Not even close to a captured utility. And if it were, which state on the planet should own it?
20 replies →
This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.
When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.
The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.
The real problem here is that all those businesses are rounding errors on the balance sheet compared to ads, so the CEO doesn't care (or even know) about the issues and isn't motivated to improve anything.
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They can treat their customers like livestock because their customers are okay with it. Why is that?
My hypothesis: turkeys think the farm is an amazing life until the week before Thanksgiving. Nobody really groks that Google is shit until it's too late.
2 replies →
Except we read here stories of ad customers - their main buisness - here indicating they don't give a shit about them either.
They are just so big, they can afford not giving a shit at all.
> Except we read here stories of ad customers - their main buisness - here indicating they don't give a shit about them either.
> They are just so big, they can afford not giving a shit at all.
You have to realise your idea that people use them for no reason is not very likely, don't you?
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With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea. Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
Punish them. I'm leaving trustpilot because I realized I was talking to an LLM during renewal. Fuck em.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.