Yours/google's definition of scale is very narrow, which was my point. Google only looks at scale from a software point of view. While that may work with search, there are many industries where you must scale with humans, such as door to door sales. Google's insistence on their narrow vision of scale may have a lot to do with why they find it hard to make in roads with their local strategy or say google checkout. Meanwhile paypal has little problem hiring more people to provide phone support to tens of millions of customers. Google isn't special. In fact, they don't even have tens of millions of customers for most of the products that require such type of support. Sounds too much like premature scaling and overthinking on google's part.

The word "scale" needs a definition. Everything scales linearly, some things scale logarithmically, etc. In practice, everything scales unless it's serial (nine women can't make a baby in a month, etc).

Customer support doesn't scale amazingly well, but you can get more people to service more customers, so it does scale.