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Don't mistake lack of customer service for 'disdain'. For every issue related to Googles free products and services when have you ever really, and I mean really needed a traditional customer service rep?

Maybe once? Not at all?

I would hate Gmail never to have happened becuase they felt it would require a call center and they were not prepared to do that...

And as for 'transparency'... um, they're a private company. But a very transparent one at that in many other ways. Just not 'transparent' in this one way?

While I'm here...

(1) "Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses"

I've found the blog helpful (not always, but its still there): http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-your-story.html

(2) "Google is not interested in hearing about problems"

Try this link: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail

(3) "and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it"

To be fair, as a dev its much much easier to solve a problem when you experience it first-hand but I maintain that they don't necessarily wait until it happens to them before problems get addressed.

You know, you could be absolutely right in all respects BUT you assume its somehow malicious, or condescending or whatever - when, at worst, its benign.

3 comments

I'm sorry, but even though I've never needed Google support for Gmail, that doesn't excuse their lack of it.

If they want to be taken seriously, or considered at all for real enterprise app replacement with Gmail or Google docs, they need to have a real live phone support, 1-800 number that lusers can call to get someone that will try to help them.

Let me give you a terrible example: I sync my Exchange calendar with Google Calendar so I can get it on my mobile devices. As I work for a large Fortune 15-20 company, one of my meetings was a weekly recurring meeting with 2,000+ participants. This is not unusual as our quarterly all employees meeting requests are sent out to 50,000+ participants.

This recurring meeting with only 2,000+ participants was cancelled, but I was completely unable to remove it from my Google Calendar. Google Calendar is broken, and after searching online for about an hour for a solution, I found many other people have the same exact issue.

So, here I am with a recurring event in my Google Calendar that I cannot delete: An error has occurred. Please try again later. - this is the level of support I get from Google.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=51...

Basically, search the forums and find the bug has existed since 2009, and no communication from Google about fixing it. Do they really expect to be taken seriously in the enterprise space?

If you are running Gmail through google apps for enterprises, then you do have customer support options. Of course, then you also pay.

E-mail support is only for "select administrative issues", and phone support is only for reporting "a service unusable issue caused by a Google server error"[1].

It doesn't sound like the GP's issue would fall into either of those categories.

[1]: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

Exactly. I'm not paying for the service so I can't really complain, but when many users report a bug in 2009, where Google Calendar completely chokes and can't delete or modify meeting requests with more than a handful of recipients, you would expect a company like Google to at least reply "we've opened a bug and are working on fixing this issue."

Instead, the silence on their troubleshooting forums is deafening. It's as if the engineers just don't care about fixing it, despite what would happen in the real world if a Google Apps sales rep came to our company to do a real evaluation... I suspect they would be laughed out of the room once they admitted they couldn't handle meeting invites with more than a handful of attendees.

When I tested out Apps Premier I was able to get phone support and was very well assisted by them. While a certain level of support is expected from a 'free' service, I don't think it is viable to offer phone support for it. In much the same way, it is horribly difficult to get phone support for any free email service, yahoo, hotmail, etc.

Me too. After one escalation I got a super pleasant guy on the phone who spent 10 minutes helping me find the problem (which, btw, was my own fault).

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" ... um, they're a private company. ..."

Screeeeeeech! http://www.google.com/finance?q=goog

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Sorry - my bad. I meant in so much as a government agency etc should be transparent (but that's not a great example either) :)

Does google consider gmail users to have value? Be it via ad views or good will, etc. If so, then is it in their interest to provide a commensurate level of support to their users? Sure there's no legal binding contract, but at what point does it cross from being benign to being bad business.

The fact is that this is a common complaint that Google seems content to ignore. Which is their right, but is it the best choice from a business perspective? I don't know.