Expecting something for free is exactly what leads to being ghosted, whether by a person (see the lament of the GNOME Calendar maintainer that was up here earlier) or a company.
It's "free" in the sense that we aren't giving them money directly, but they make their billions by relying on us to use these services. Implying users who aren't entering a credit card number are of no value to Google is either disingenuous or short sighted.
Beyond just that point I think a critical dependence on these services, mixed with a general tech illiteracy and an uncaring corporation is a dangerous situation to be in. One could argue that it's the user who is responsible for maintaining access to their email account, but the reality is that the vast majority of users are not educated in these areas and absolutely need help. A corporation that won't help them use the services they provide deserves to be replaced by one that will -- unfortunately, Google is so dominant that the chance of someone seeking out and finding ProtonMail or rolling their own server is tiny. It's hard to compete with Gmail, even when you have options like ProtonMail which provide excellent customer service (with phone numbers!)
I'm just thinking out loud. It seems like a problem to me. Dunno how to solve it.
The claim is that you can't even pay for good support.
The relative badness between paid and free is irrelevant.
Have you honestly never seen one of the stories about how badly google treats paying customers, and specifically how automated it all is? I can do the job of searching that if you need me to, but I'm not going to argue about free vs. paid because that's not the topic at hand.
You went from “how can I be clearer” to deciding my criteria for clarity are not relevant in this discussion because we are not arguing free vs. paid. I thought that was exactly what we were discussing based on my original question.
Furthermore, sporadic blog posts/tweets here and there are not indicative of how the vast majority of users feel about this service. Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
It’s worth remembering what email was like before Gmail came around. With their spam analysis they basically fixed email and moved the world towards a simpler web ui for email (as opposed to hotmail etc. of the day).
> You went from “how can I be clearer” to deciding my criteria for clarity are not relevant in this discussion because we are not arguing free vs. paid. I thought that was exactly what we were discussing based on my original question.
You were asking about free vs. paid in a way that would provide no value to the discussion except to discredit a particular anecdote. But that's a distraction from the real problem, the inability to get good support, and that anecdote was just an example and not necessary as proof.
I say your criteria are irrelevant because the answer doesn't change the root complaint at all.
> Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain.
Adding value to what? I have doubt in that argument for email which usually costs a couple dollars a month. It's not a thousand dollar product that excludes amateurs. And the problem is not the typical user, it's the one that gets banned suddenly. If that happens the more value you're making by doing business over email, the worse it gets!
And none of your points about gmail being useful are relevant to support either.
"Especially paid users who generally are too busy adding value to complain." Sooooo, people who are too busy paying Google for services, while also being data mined for profit, to complain about being on fully automated support? You need to add a disclaimer that you work for Google.
And based on Google's track record and extremely money-centric business style, along with a complete lack of humanity towards their users, makes me not trust their ToS. Do you?
And excuse me, your comments gave me the impression that you were.
I don’t know their balance sheets, but the organization I work for (~30k employees and I’m sure many other much larger ones) have enterprise G Suite accounts. Those accounts alone are worth a lot of money to Google, and I think even they would not be foolish enough to slice open the goose that lays the golden egg.
What’s more, the lack of humanity is completely unrelated to lack of legality and lack of desire for income. Both of which Google have mostly adhered to (unlike e.g. Facebook, Uber, AirBnB).
