261–270 of 288 posts
Over the years I’ve read so many horror stories of people being locked out of their Google accounts for a wide variety of reasons. Trying to get Google’s help is like pleading for help by sending messages to /dev/null. I’ve migrated everything I possibly can off their services as a result. Google Maps and YouTube I find hard or impossible to really replace but I don’t have any critical data there. I remember how exci…
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Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human support in the first place - there are no massive cost savings, because it does not scale well.
There’s a lot to automate when doing phone support. The vast difference between the sub 20 cents per minute you need to pay people to answer phones and the 98 cents per minute each call costs are largely things that could be automated. And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.
For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
This also happens with Amazon, FWIW. We were doing a reconciliation on our credit card statements and saw some charges from Amazon that didn't correspond to anything in our order history, for like $30 or so. (Amazon charges as it ships, so in large orders where not all items ship together you can be charged random amounts). We ended up charging them back. Amazon nuked my account. I've been an Amazon customer since th…
Did you move your spending elsewhere? If not then their math worked correctly. I think we need to be principled when dealing with companies. This is the only way to make them behave as they should.
Products and services will improve at the learning rate that the market imposes.
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There’s a lot to automate when doing phone support. The vast difference between the sub 20 cents per minute you need to pay people to answer phones and the 98 cents per minute each call costs are largely things that could be automated. And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.
There are definite cost reductions that can be made, but they pale in comparison to keeping humans out of the loop. For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.
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Your point 1 isn't really true. People charge back businesses all the time for any reason up to and including "I don't want to pay for this and this is how I don't have to". It's a huge problem for folks like eBay sellers, for example.
Neither point is reliably true. They are the extremes of a spectrum.
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There are definite cost reductions that can be made, but they pale in comparison to keeping humans out of the loop. For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
That’s just the most obvious approach, adjusting the product and internal processes to avoid having people call is even more effective. Upselling people is another way to drop net costs even further, etc. I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.
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This is a use case that public blockchains could solve for us. Having a decentralized proof of digital rights ownership on a public blockchain could separate the content provider (Amazon / Google / EA) from the actual media they provide by storing it on IPFS or some other decentralized file store. There would need to be a lot of work done to make this happen and big companies would have to get on board. It doesn't se…
So time to play the same old game: does block chain provide any value here that a separate centralized DB doesn't? Let's see, can't you solve the exact same problem by simply having a centralized organization have a database of digital content ownership? Essentially a title record DB? Seems like it. And how does your blockchain solution solve the problem of someone is hacking the game and needs to be banned? Can the…
Thank you for this. Reminds me of the form someone came up with about "Here's why your spam solution won't work" that was posted many times on slashdot in the '90s.
To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with i…
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It's totally ridiculous. Imagine Walmart tried to do the same thing with physical goods; say any shoplifter Walmart catches immediately gets all their Walmart purchases taken back. We'd never allow it. Even if they were conflicted of theft, we wouldn't say "oh, sure, Walmart can come in and take your desk". Why have we allowed it with digital goods?
More accurate comparison: you return a purchase to Walmart for a refund - which, unlike shoplifting, is entirely legal - and they then seize all your previous Walmart purchases and ban you from the premises. After all, disputing a charge on your credit card isn't some shady underhanded process; it's a right you have under law [1]. The real issue here is that, under digital distribution models, you have no real owners…
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So time to play the same old game: does block chain provide any value here that a separate centralized DB doesn't? Let's see, can't you solve the exact same problem by simply having a centralized organization have a database of digital content ownership? Essentially a title record DB? Seems like it. And how does your blockchain solution solve the problem of someone is hacking the game and needs to be banned? Can the…
A centralized organization like EA, you mean? That is what parent is pointing out: you don’t own the assets under license. If you want to see an example of decentralization in the context of a game, look at Dark Forest. https://www.designboom.com/technology/dark-forest-one-of-a-k...
Not like EA because that wouldn't be a separate organization / 3rd party.
The only interesting thing OP is asking for is someone other than the game company to maintain digital title tracking. That is a reasonable request. The same way your city might have a database of who owns title's for our house. A centralized database owned by a 3rd party.
But none of that has anything to do with a blockchain or being distributed. Continuously people keep mixing up having 3rd party ownership (which sometimes does help solve problems) with a blockchain (which 99 time out of 100 adds tons of complexity and usually zero or negative value). That's the key distinction being made here.