Too bad. If you have a business (and Google is a business) that goes business with the public (which Google does), you should offer some form of customer services. It's what we human beings call "the right thing to do."
Yes, customer service costs money. It costs money for the dry cleaners, the restaurants, the banks, the car washes, the design firms, and every single other company on the planet. It's a basic part of the financials of running a business, and is called "cost of doing business."
Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie. Surely, there's a YouTube tutorial for that.
Just because Google's a "tech" company, people on HN pretend like it's OK to not provide customer service. Bullshit. It has billions and billions and billions of dollars that it can throw at the customer service problem, but it doesn't for one simple reason: Greed.
How about the restaurant down the street maximizes its shareholder profits by not honoring your reservation? How about the dry cleaner optimizes its workflow by only being open three minutes a day? How about your kid's school right-sizes its workforce responsibilities by kicking your kid out on the street when you got stuck in traffic and couldn't pick him up at the exact moment the school bell rang?
If Google is so wonderful, full of so many smart people, then how come it can't solve its customer service problem? Ignoring the problem isn't a solution. You can do better™.
The need for unbounded growth is not a valid justification for not acknowledging humans.
Now, I'm not sure what would be the solution. Regulation requiring some level of support? "Right to talk to a capable human" or somesuch? Sounds a bit arbitrary. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to un-Google myself and use more respectul alternatives, as well as raising awareness in my immediate circle.
If you're not able to do business at Google Scale without providing human support (and similarly, not treating support personnel like absolute garbage, as we see with call center operators for ISPs and whatnot), then maybe you just can't operate at that scale?
This goes even further: things like free-to-play games that use psychological manipulation to culture addictive personalities and whatnot seem ethically wrong to me. If your business model depends on absolutely fleecing vulnerable people, then maybe it shouldn't be viable?
I guess the base premise is I don't think companies should "have the right to make all the money in the world".
To be clear, I'm not advocating for the solution above, but I sure believe the problem described _is_ in fact legitimate within my morals.
In the physical goods world, there is no company that is allowed to dump products onto market and pretend like their customers do not exist. If their product cause harm to the consumer, their products will get recalled or they'd get sued.
Google has somehow allowed itself to infinitely scale their users but also infinitely shrink their liabilities/duty by binding all users to their ToS which foists arbitration on all of them.
My position is that google is subject to the same laws as physical goods companies, and held to the same standard as they are for product recalls. No more, no less.
I do not claim that some sort of utopia of ultimate consumer protection exists. It does not for google, nor for physical goods companies.
> Yeah, lawyers are just lining up to represent those homeless folks, elderly grandmothers, and people who just don't get tech.
Represent them for what precisely? The tort of not providing a good user interface?
I don't think wealth has much to do with the lack of google being sued here. Wealth may buy better lawyers, but it doesn't create grounds for a lawsuit out of thin air.
> Clearly you've never been poor.
Life often sucks and is not fair. It is not google's responsibility to eradicate poverty
The librarian's letter that we're commenting on describes many concrete ways in which people are getting harmed and google getting away with doing nothing.
> Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie.
At their scale, this exact scenario happens all the time. The back-stop is that Google chooses to stop doing business with unreliable service providers.
This is also an option for Google users. Gmail competitors are just a click away.
If Google is not satisfied with the level of cleaning in their buildings and fires the custodial contractor, they don't lose access to their buildings because the janitors walked away with the keys. When people start using Gmail, they don't expect to someday lose access to their online banking and utility bills and all the rest, and by the time it does happen to them and they decide to look for a competitor, a lot more damage has been done due to missed bills, etc. It's not as lighthearted as, "Oh, this burger tastes bad, guess I'll go to a competitor's burger shack." If regulation improves the terms the users agree to so they have some way to get reasonable help from customer service and Google finds that too expensive, they can either charge for Gmail or shut it down.
> they don't lose access to their buildings because the janitors walked away with the keys
... You are actually ascribing a larger amount of have-their-shit-togetherness to Google than may be strictly true. Without telling too many stories that aren't mine, I'll say "Usually. They usually don't." ;)
But to extend your analogy a bit... Google doesn't lose physical access to their headquarters because security is not a third-party vendor. They keep the mission-critical stuff in-house. That would translate, analogously, to individual homeless or elderly people running their own mail servers (infeasible)... Or, perhaps, libraries running mail servers and providing accounts for patrons tied to their library cards (might be actually, maybe, feasible?).
> When people start using Gmail, they don't expect to someday lose access to their online banking and utility bills and all the rest, and by the time it does happen to them and they decide to look for a competitor, a lot more damage has been done due to missed bills, etc.
You're absolutely right, and the back stop is almost certainly to make people aware of this very significant risk factor in using Gmail instead of alternatives.
> If regulation improves the terms the users agree to so they have some way to get reasonable help from customer service and Google finds that too expensive, they can either charge for Gmail or shut it down.
If such regulation is impossible at the scale of serving 1.5 billion customers, which I assert it is until somebody can provide a practical road map for getting to that scenario, then your recommended remedy for "Gmail doesn't work reliably for a subset of its users" is "Deny its benefits to all of its users." That seems strictly worse than a solution where we encourage people to be conscious of their risk tolerance before signing up for service with a company that can't guarantee they won't get locked out of their account with no easy method to unlock it.
> Too bad. If you have a business (and Google is a business) that goes business with the public (which Google does), you should offer some form of customer services. It's what we human beings call "the right thing to do."
Lets pause on that thought.
Why is there a moral imperative to offer customer service (provided they dont misrepresent that they do)? What is the basis for a moral obligation?
Its not like there is a line in the bible saying "thou shalt offer tech support". Admitidly im not convinced by religious arguments, but i dont see any more modern moral source either.
> Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie. Surely, there's a YouTube tutorial for that.
That's not really a customer support inquiry. That said, one of two things happen - either they are ok with it, or they are not. If they are not they negotiate other terms or hire a different cleaning company.
I'm not saying you have to like google's policies, just that its not unethical for google to have policies you don't like.
> Bullshit. It has billions and billions and billions of dollars that it can throw at the customer service problem, but it doesn't for one simple reason: Greed.
Wait. Are you telling me that a private corporation in america is trying to maximize profits? The horrors. I would have never guessed. What next? Is the sky blue?
> How about the restaurant down the street maximizes its shareholder profits by not honoring your reservation?
A) that action does not maximize shareholder profit.
And b) its wrong because they promised something and didn't deliver. The sin is in the reneging.
If google promised customer support and didn't deliver, that would be wrong. But google didn't promise customer support.
> How about the dry cleaner optimizes its workflow by only being open three minutes a day?
Sounds like a shitty dry cleaner, but i fail to see the ethical issue. If the dry cleaner doesn't meet your needs, don't use it.
Quite frankly, i think this entire thing reeks of entitlement. Just because someone offers to sell you a service, doesn't mean they have an obligation to provide it in the fashion you want. Their obligation is to not mislead, and be honest about what they are offering. Maybe what they are offering works for you, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't dont do business with them.
> If Google is so wonderful, full of so many smart people, then how come it can't solve its customer service problem?
Because they don't want to and there is nothing wrong with that.
> You seem to be working with a different definition of "wrong" than the rest of the planet.
How would you define it then?
I know this is sort of a trick question, as defining morality is something moral philosophers have struggled with since forever.
Generally though, i think that if you give something to someone for free, you're not responsible to teach them how to use it or make it accessible to use (Unless you promised otherwise).
e.g. We don't think Linus is responsible for teaching a course on how to use Linux.
> There are people becoming homeless and losing government benefits because of Google.
Is it really because of google? I would think the primary party to blame here would be the government that seems to insist using email to communicate about benefits. This seems highly inappropriate given the audience they are trying to serve.
> Either you didn't read the letter, or you are a deeply amoral person who should seek professional help.
You can be sympathetic to the situation without thinking google is at fault here. Or alternatively think the situation is really sad and unfortunate but think that imposing a duty to provide support is a bad solution.
Too bad. If you have a business (and Google is a business) that goes business with the public (which Google does), you should offer some form of customer services. It's what we human beings call "the right thing to do."
Yes, customer service costs money. It costs money for the dry cleaners, the restaurants, the banks, the car washes, the design firms, and every single other company on the planet. It's a basic part of the financials of running a business, and is called "cost of doing business."
Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie. Surely, there's a YouTube tutorial for that.
Just because Google's a "tech" company, people on HN pretend like it's OK to not provide customer service. Bullshit. It has billions and billions and billions of dollars that it can throw at the customer service problem, but it doesn't for one simple reason: Greed.
How about the restaurant down the street maximizes its shareholder profits by not honoring your reservation? How about the dry cleaner optimizes its workflow by only being open three minutes a day? How about your kid's school right-sizes its workforce responsibilities by kicking your kid out on the street when you got stuck in traffic and couldn't pick him up at the exact moment the school bell rang?
If Google is so wonderful, full of so many smart people, then how come it can't solve its customer service problem? Ignoring the problem isn't a solution. You can do better™.