Someone replied on one of those threads that with (made up number) 2 billion users, of which 0.5 billion probably lack basic computer literacy x $15 per hour x 1 ticket per year... Etc etc ....it works out to be like 50% of Google's profit or something. And they end up employing 20,000 FTEs in call center.

Or you know....they don't.

Not really sure what the right answer is here but I don't feel it's my right to tell google to spend $X billion a year in service.

Maybe a competitor comes up with service, and google gets beat.

Support could be paid. If it ends up being Google's fault the fee is refunded, otherwise the fee is kept. This will deal and scale no matter how many idiots are calling as they're the ones paying the people answering the calls.

Charging for support, even if it's contingent as you described, would definitely be more of a drag on brand than having no support.

Worldwide first-line of technical support at $15/h seems an order of magnitude off.

Yeah that definitely seems off. I worked at a tech company where approximately half our employees were customer support, and each was paid closer to $30/hour. I don't see how we could have ever paid $15/hour/head for our support team.

For free accounts, sure. But paying Google cloud customers get treated the same and have to make a ruckus on HN just to get Google engineers to notice them. There's really no excuse.

I guess in both cases the alternative would be to pay (more) money for the service, which is something the majority of people doesn’t want. The system is optimized for the 99.9% cases where stuff like that just doesn’t happen

The results may be the same, but the situation that causes them is different in one crucial way:

The theater in question simply employed no one who had the capability to fix the problem (or at least, no one who was on site at that time).

Google employs many thousands of people, plenty of whom have the capability to fix problems that come up with accounts—they just choose to make them completely unavailable to users who have problems with their accounts.

Google does tend to be at the leading edge of stuff, both good and bad. This one, as a 'nobody user' sucks.