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I'm a Google One subscriber, but even with that I don't think it's gonna be useful if/when shit hits the fan. I'm still trying to minimize damage and do a monthly Google Takeout of all my data.
To paraphrase a classic Lily Tomlin punchline: > "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Tech Company." This is why unregulated industries and monopolies are bad.
On the contrary, the phone company (to which the actual quote refers to) was a government-instituted monopoly and far from an unregulated industry.
2) I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google. I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet.
3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve.
4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed.
1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…
In part I want to agree with you because I get the same version of random calls but for different reasons. But the truth is the difference between what we (or anyone) is doing and what google is doing is google makes plenty of money that they can use to throw at the problem.
The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be).
> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve.
So you have to wonder then what is the reason they don't do this as many probably (including myself) have thought of the same thing. Sure they do have that with business email (google workspace).
> 4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed.
This is most likely true and was also true with certain other products of companies let's even say Microsoft. Imagine the amount of frustration (falling short of suicide I mean) that people have as a result of using product that don't work or offer little or no support.
Also another point (that you didn't make) is the behavior by google then enables all sorts of other companies who would never act that way (and have no reason to) to act the same way (similar again to what happened when the first PC's came out). In many cases the end users became the beta testers for products (and they still are) that are released to early.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you list a couple? I’m interested in moving my email, document storage, and document manipulation (word and sheet stuff) to one nice solution somewhere else.
Why does it have to be in one place? There are dozens of cheap and fairly private email providers and you can run spreadsheets locally or self-host an Etherpad.
Google offers support to paying customers https://one.google.com/about/support
It is very shitty support though. I attempted to get an issue fixed with backups not working. The first 5 emails were the google moron telling me how to start a backup, ignoring my clear communication that I'd run a backup and it didn't backup my data, as was clear by the space usage. The next 5-7 emails terminated when their suggestion was to remove the password from my phone. I'm not sure why that could have helped…
Are you paying them?
No. But it's not possible to do so. Given an email lockout, a $100+ incidence support cost would be reasonable. But there might be legal implications there because it's likely their fault the account was (wrongly) locked out. IANAL
1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…
I don't know of any Google-specific stories, but this has happened to people reliant on other tech companies and, more often than not, it was intentional. Most of the targets are foreign nationals, because they try to buy American "troublemakers" off first, but there are a couple high-profile cases of this sort of thing happening in the US.
We live in a strange time wherein corporations can act with a complete absence of accountability, especially if the out-of-touch, rich, geriatric men who write our laws can be hoodwinked into thinking that abuse of technological leverage is somehow impossible (because the mechanisms are beyond what they personally understand).
They have competitors who provide support. As you said you chose them knowing this was a risk.
Can you list a couple? I’m interested in moving my email, document storage, and document manipulation (word and sheet stuff) to one nice solution somewhere else.
I’ve used it, it’s ok, certainly no worse than google and you get a much better text editor, spreadsheet, and actual Powerpoint if you need that. I think you can get sso across github, linkedin, teams instead of zoom, etc too, though I haven’t tried.
If you use Apple you can use icloud/iwork which has shared editing, etc, but I don’t know if it has support. It’s pretty bare bones but basically free for a small operation.
You can get nextcloud as a hosted service instead of running it yourself.
Etc
No matter what you choose you’re not getting a fully integrated experience — you’ll likely have slack, jira, github, AWS etc regardless. So fast mail + Dropbox might be great for you. For example going MS or Google won’t mean you’ll want to use azure or google cloud unless you have a very specialized application, no matter what their salespeople think.