Providing customer support is a part of a having a business and should be prioritized over adding random features no one asked for to your product.

Volunteering at a pet shelter is not part of the business of being an angry anonymous internet person.

Non-paying users are not customers, thus google doesn't really earn them support for their products. For paying users, that's a different story.

they banned somebody that bought stuff inside the app store.

Though Google is merely a storefront en payment intermediary of what the banned user bought (apps and movies), it could be argued the client of google per se is the companies selling the product, they're the one paying Google a share of their sales.

Not that I disagree with you here just making the argument.

Like parent said, I found that google has decent customer service once you clearly become their client (which I have been on adwords, analytics and on gsuite).

Not the parent poster, but I'll take a stab at this.

I'd wager that the parent poster doesn't have any sort of direct relationship with the local pet shelter: there's no contract, or handshake agreements, nothing like that.

The lack of a relationship is key.

Google provides services to a large number of people, and while they don't charge (most) consumers directly for those services in dollar-units, Google's user base does pay via other means: nominally by being on the receiving end of hyper-targeted ads.

There's a relationship there. Google provides a service, in exchange for psychological capital, which Google then translates into cashflow via advertisers.

Relationships, good ones at least, require trust. And the fact that I know that there is a server inside of Google which will mercilessly nuke my account from orbit without warning... isn't exactly trust-inspiring.

Moreover, I know that if that does happen, I have effectively zero options to resolve the problem. I'm screwed.

Google could choose to fix this problem, and to invest their rather substantial resources in building trust. But they don't, and instead kick out toy apps like the above. This sends a very strong message to people like the parent poster, in that Google doesn't really value them or their well-being.

Now, Google isn't required to be trustworthy. Plenty of organizations aren't. But there's nothing wrong with customers calling that out and demanding more when they feel Google isn't allocating its resources in their best interests. It's also completely within Google's purview to utterly ignore them.

That's the difference: in one case, there's an established relationship, and that comes with certain expectations. In the other, not so much.

I feel like in your attempt, you lost sight of the fact that this project has no relation with customer support at google, other than originating from Google.

Lots of things originate from google. You can say the exact same thing of all of them. In fact you can plain and simply say "Google has time to do ANYTHING, yet it doesn't have time to provide customer support for that very thing?"

There's a point to be made that Google should be providing support. Do you think this, specifically, is what they should cut for it?

Prima facie this comment enraged me, but on reflection it has a deep point; both parties here are just acting out of rational self interest. Google has decided that their bottom line won't suffer if they tell locked-out customers to get fucked. They would rather use the money on cheeky bets that carry small risk and have high potential upside.

The critical corollary is that if you still feel it is a problem that Google doesn't provide support, and feel that "the market will fix it" is unconvincing in light of the available evidence, then you ought to be in favour of regulation that obligates them to.

And would that regulation I'd be in favor of prevent them from doing this kind of cool project linked here?

Because I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point.

> I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point

The point is that FAANG companies are smart enough to elude a simple Hanlon's razor analysis.

Put more explicitly: 1. Your critique of OP's argument is fundamentally correct. Pointing out that Google could solve the problem if they wanted to is missing the point. Google doesn't want to solve the problem 2. Therefore, we either have to live with the status quo, or we have to change the incentive structure.

It might seem trivial to you, but I think it's an important point. Many members of the hn crowd exhibit this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, they have a strong moral intuition that a particularly policy of tech giants is wrong (in this case, their choice not to put money in support), but on the other hand, an equally strong knee-jerk resistance to regulation of our industry.

Recognition that Google (or any other giant) are just doing what's best for them (as per their definition of "best") is an important step.

I do not think that anyone is against this project (except maybe for privacy reasons).

Obligating them would solve the problem without creating a bunch of new problems. Your suggestions would create more problems than they solve.

A given company is typically not Capital-G-Good or Capital-E-Evil. They are probably doing some things well, and doing some things poorly. They respond to incentives. When a company is doing things poorly in a way that is hurting consumers, we should ask what incentives they're responding to.

Google has failed at support. They also do plenty of things well. On my view it's weird to take the position that they don't. I regard Google Search as the crown jewel of modern engineering.

The money Google spent on these devs with inflated bay area salaries would’ve been enough for an army of customer support agents

Source your claim or show your work. My guess: you're wrong by a factor of three.