Google and PayPal both fall into the category of not putting enough profits into customer support.
This is what most fear from market consolidation and extremely large companies. They squeeze more profits from doing things that a company without monopoly-like characteristics could not get away with. To me, when you cross this line, you have become evil.
fyi, I spent more than 2 hours last night getting my PayPal personal account unlocked. It was an awful web and phone customer support and terrible security practices.
It's great to see this discussion here and especially to have Matt Cutts weighing in.
It does seem like this is an endemic problem in Google and comes right from the top. Some startups focus on customer service and use it as a differentiator. Others focus on product and believe they can build their way out of support.
Google is and always has been in the second category. The mindset is from what I understand firmly held by Larry and Sergey and manifests itself through the whole company. Until they change, it seems unlikely the support teams will change.
Yes, this does seem to be a top-down problem and not a result of incompetence.
I'm guessing they won't change until they see their profits effected. As to PayPal, I have chosen other providers. So I only have to deal with them if some vendor only accepts PayPal and I really want to use that vendor.
As for Google, for now, I don't need to serve up ads. If and when I do, I will spend time to see if alternate ad brokers can give me equal or better returns. Google knows that their hold on the ad market stays as long as buyers and publishers do not move in sync. That is, its very hard for a publisher to use a different brokerage when all the buyers feel they need to use Google (and vice verse). This movement is probably best done by market segment. Specialty brokers ("we only do blogs", "we do sports very well", etc) should be the ones to disrupt this space. I guess this is already being done, but it certainly isn't happening fast enough. Ideas?
This comment is obviously an utter and complete waste of space, but I couldn't resist pointing out the irony of someone called "lucifer" failing to see how something is evil.
Actually, the root meaning of the name is 'Light', from which one can arrive at the notion of 'Sight' So what is really ironic is that any sentient would deny their inner lucifer and presume for itself an objective view of truth ...
