> they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service
No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.
Obviously, they get a cut of App Store revenue. Android is worth many billions of dollars to Google, and having quality apps on the store is an essential part of the ecosystem.
To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less.
The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube.
IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
> this will eventually cost them billions of dollars
It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
Yup. For whatever Amazon's other faults may be, they will do stuff like assign actual human salespeople to your account, who have the time to listen to you and the authority to do things. You can create problem tickets for their services, which go to skilled engineers somewhere that have the time and authority to run down and address any weirdness you encounter with their services. Plus they keep even their old services online for a sort-of ridiculous amount of time to keep up with slow-moving corporate update processes.
Is this not the case for GCP? I recently switched to a company running on GCP and I don't have tons of exposure to our infra, but from what I've seen, GCP reps are VERY hands-on. Even in my non-infra role, I've been exposed to several different instances of them being hands on: in setting us up, in discussing our resource needs (we're a very heavy GPU compute customer), in tracking down issues (even when the problem is likely on our end).
I don't actually know - I haven't used it myself. I've read a few comments in various places suggesting that GCP support is as nonexistent as the support for other Google services. I think somebody said they were hosting their whole company's data and services on GCP, and their entire company's account was killed because supposedly some malicious activity was detected. No details of what the activity was or why it was thought to be malicious, just poof, all of your servers and data gone, and nobody you can talk to about it.
It's possible that was misleading or they've improved since then, I don't know. Your claim that they do have quality support for corporate accounts is an interesting point on the other side though.
Yea I wouldn't take my experience as too dispositive: I gather that my relatively small company punches significantly above their weight in terms of compute needs, and I only have relatively tangential exposure to our interactions with GCP. It's just that those tangential data points have all happened to point in the direction of robust and responsive support.
I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower.
> this will eventually cost them billions of dollars
It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money.
> their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions
Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
Except they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases, so this doesn't make any sense. Why would they bother running the Play Store at all if it didn't make them money?
> they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases
Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google.
Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.
They know that whatever algorithm is used here will fire off some false positives. They also believe that paying people to review in order to correct the false positives is not worth it.
If you pay for an app, you are a Google Play customer. They are acting as a retailer, purchasing software from a vendor and distributing it to you as a markup. The developer of the software is the "third party" in the transaction.
I'm not sure why there are downvotes on this comment. It's pretty clear this is the case - what Google Products have dedicated account executives that give you their phone number? Ads and Cloud. The two direct-buy relationships you can have with Google. Even G Suite doesn't merit dedicated CSMs until you're fortune 100...
I once made the mistake of renting a movie from Google Play Movies. I am a customer. The "my purchases" page just shows an error, so I can't find the titles I own or have rented. There is no place to report this except in a user to user forum.
No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.