This is the most telling part of the conversation to me. Not just for the hypocrisy others have mentioned, but for the attitude of the Support rep that it reveals. The rep feels so powerless and so disconnected from their own company that a resigned laugh is their first response to an inconsistent rule.
The few companies that manage to have mostly excellent support folks are the ones that:
1. Keep the support guidelines clear and sensible, and more importantly
2. Give the support folk the power to make internal changes (or at least to start discussions) when they aren't sensible or consistent.
Amazon has done very well along these lines, while Google apparently still doesn't trust Support enough to do this.
If that's a full and accurate transcript; then there's a lot of things deeply wrong with that.
If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now?
I get sense of humor, but there's a time and a place. A customer just had their account blocked, now's not the time to be anything but apologetic. Customer Service 101 stuff here.
Side note: clicking on the download button on that page reveals the EULA which the user must accept before downloading. I agree that the support agent probably shouldn't have responded "lol", but Google's download page is up to their own requirements.
We don't have the whole conversation. How do we know that the author didn't selectively show us his conversation with Google? Let's not jump to a conclusion.
This recent Google "crackdown" was making rounds in shareware circles.
Basically, a shareware vendor will have their AdWords account suspended with some harsh wording and the stated reason would be that the website doesn't have either (a) uninstall instructions next to the download button (b) terms and conditions next to the download button (c) the software is of "unwanted" type (d) some other random thing (that was A-OK before) not being quite up to sniff. All in all, it looks just some random nitpicking that will go away only if the matter is escalated, which takes several weeks to process. The general sentiment seems to be that Google no longer gives a flying f*ck about smaller AdWords customers and/or some run-away manager is basically having a field day with enforcing arbitrary clauses of their AdWords T&C.
What's going on in reality - nobody knows because of how "open" and communicative on the issue Google is.
Before Google's new terms for software AdWords, it was extremely common for scumbags to wrap freeware or OSS in spyware and buy ads for the software's name. Users would click what looked like the first result, land on what looked like a legitimate download page, and end up with something ugly like Conduit.
I'm the "computer geek" for some friends and family, so I've fixed up a good number of PCs, and AdWords has been by far the #1 vector for malware. A lot of people in my position just started installing ad blockers on every PC they work on, to save trouble later. Google's new approach has a lot of problems, obviously, but they're not just power-tripping.
Given the fact that Google don't follow their own guidelines (I checked their desktop and android download pages) it would be interesting to hear the EU competition commission's point of view given their current objections to Google's behaviour regarding adwords.
I just checked the Chrome desktop[0] and Android SDK[1] download pages, and both do follow the guidelines - clicking on the download button reveals the EULA which the user must agree to prior to downloading the software.
I'm actually surprised they ended up getting a successful outcome, given the hostile tone they took with the support person. Being hostile is usually a great way to get a "sorry, can't help you" response.
That doesn't sound like a terribly hostile tone. Yes, there was a little bit of hostility, but nowhere near the level that would lead a support person to give up on helping you.
Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. People get in touch when something is wrong, and so it's fairly common for people to be frustrated. If they just responded with "sorry, can't help you" to every support query with a slightly hostile tone, they wouldn't be providing much support.
And yes, it is also good to try and assume good faith and not vent your frustration at a support person who had nothing to do with whatever issue it is that you're frustrated about. But it's a fact of life in support that you'll have to deal with some unhappy people, so you need to be able to deal with it.
I’m surprised anyone even takes Google seriously with the rules they try to enforce – for example the "specific uninstall instructions", even if it follows the OS standard procedure. (Tbh, I’d have just put a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and the Apple Support site there).
Or the fact that you have to show the EULA before the download – which is also not really helpful in any way.
These rules don’t really help either side (as people producing malicious ads can still do so, but people doing honest ads have to comply with rules that don’t help at all), but add more stress for both sides.
Yeah, it's missing the "Hi", "Thanks"... Mistakes are made, support people are usually not the one responsible. I've a business that > $1M with Google too and I aim to be kind even if they screw up and even if it's a lot of money.
That's said Google is going down hill for a while now.
For future reference; being a dick to the guy in support trying to help you doesn't really do much to help the situation. It typically only results in you getting less help - nobody has the desire to go the extra mile for someone who starts out with that kind of tone.
I get you're mad at "google", but taking it out on an employee tasked with helping fix your issues is kind of like being an asshole to a waitress...
Of course it does no good at all to get mad at the rep.
But I think it's pretty reasonable that someone's going to be upset after receiving a no-notice suspension e-mail after spending a million dollars with a company. It's pocket change to Google, sure, but that's a lifetime's income for a lot of us.
Speaking as someone who worked in AOL's billing department in 2000-2002, I can say that we all know very well not to take this stuff personally. It's just what the job is, and it's not for the feint of heart.
I'd love it if everyone were nicer too, but I can easily put myself in their shoes in cases like this.
Now the people that were 100x ruder to me on a personal level over a $20 charge on their dialup account that was (often) their own fault? Not quite as much sympathy there :P
But you have to realize that at Google, that person is your only point of contact.
Making your displeasure known to at least 1 person who works there gets your message across better than sucking it up and letting them think it isn't really such a big deal.
And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality.
I find this frustrating because I hate Google for its A/B testing and blind-allocated mediocrity, and yet, everything else continues to be worse. It's like being married to someone you truly despise (at least for me, your mileage may vary).
I really don't get why no one can disrupt them. But clearly they can't...
> And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality.
YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.
I just read that article and I've lost at least 10 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back. It's amongst the worst links I ever followed on HN.
Every other search engine is worse because they are simply following Google.
Every existing search engine that I'm aware of is essentially based on the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created.
At the time it was created, it was not obvious that it was the best option - only that it was better than AltaVista's algorithm and Yahoo's curated portal model that were the options in 1999.
Why are search engines not innovating? Or, if they are, where are they?
Same reason everyone stays on Facebook even though the experience is terrible. It's like there's only one bar in town and it's a hideous dump, but it's the only place you can be sure to catch people.
This kind of stuff could easily be resolved by including a specific and complete list in the first place.
Telling someone they aren't presentable isn't the same as telling a mostly well dressed person that the host wants them to wear dark socks with their dress shoes instead of white socks. (Hopefully this analogy is fitting.)
Fashion is a matter of taste, isn't it, and ultimately as void of real meaning as the renderings of the "Opinion of Google"? I suppose perhaps your analogy fits more well than you perhaps expected, but not in Google's favor.
I wonder if Google takes reports about Google pages not following their polices seriously. Also I wonder if the same guidelines apply for major software websites, I don't think download.com follows most of these requirements.
I find the hypocrisy especially interesting given that a few years they demoted Chrome for breaking a paid link rule. It certainly seems like this is another blatant broken rule by the Chrome team - not that it's their fault because they were probably never told about the rule either.
couple of years back, adwords suspended my account.
the only response i wrote back was, I have no intentions either, of paying my money to a company that has little to no respect to its customers.
I got back instant response and got my account reinstated, but, still I didn't agree, I asked him, I need written apology from the head manager, the support person apologized for this, and said the head manager is traveling overseas. So I accepted.
I never asked the reason why they did it in the first place. I was just furious, you don't say fuck off to your customers, without first talking to them.
A great example of Google "Do as I say, not as I do."
Re "How do I uninstall this?" Google Cloud Print appeared to be, at least on Win XP a couple of years ago and when set up to share a non-Cloud-Print-native printer, a one-way process. That borked non-Cloud printing (how the printer used to work; functionality that was desired to continue) pretty thoroughly.
I like a lot of things about Google and their products. However, lack of communication on topics such as these more than borders on arrogance.
P.S. OT, but: And where is Lolipop for my 2013 Moto-X (then a Google product) from Verizon. I bought it in good part because, unlike other Verizon mobile products, timely updates were "promised" strongly as part of the marketing and promotion. (And yeah, I need Verizon for specific reasons...)
Now? Bupkiss. With the better part of a year left on my two-year contract (that I entered hesitantly but again, at least with this "promise" as some comfort/reassurance).
Google is enormously selective in their "support" and not infrequently refuses to go out of their way when it does not support the initiative du jour.
(E.g. but not only nor primarily, insisting the pressure stay on Verizon to apply these updates.)
I have a rather ominous feeling that the removal process was triggered by automated scanning picking up certain keywords like "sniffer". In today's environment of security paranoia, unfortunately it's not hard to imagine something like that being interpreted the wrong way...
Also, I think "unwanted software" is a bit opaque; what they really mean is software Google doesn't want, not necessarily the user.
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|11 years ago|reply
>Google Support: Lol
>Simtec: No really?
>Google Support: That’s a great question
This is the most telling part of the conversation to me. Not just for the hypocrisy others have mentioned, but for the attitude of the Support rep that it reveals. The rep feels so powerless and so disconnected from their own company that a resigned laugh is their first response to an inconsistent rule.
The few companies that manage to have mostly excellent support folks are the ones that:
1. Keep the support guidelines clear and sensible, and more importantly 2. Give the support folk the power to make internal changes (or at least to start discussions) when they aren't sensible or consistent.
Amazon has done very well along these lines, while Google apparently still doesn't trust Support enough to do this.
[+] [-] byuu|11 years ago|reply
If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now?
I get sense of humor, but there's a time and a place. A customer just had their account blocked, now's not the time to be anything but apologetic. Customer Service 101 stuff here.
[+] [-] timothya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|11 years ago|reply
- constantly running in the background
- autoupdates
- annoying ads to install it everywhere
- comes bundled with various freeware and checked to be installed by default
- constantly phones home by default
- consumes lots of memory, eats your battery life, eats a lot of disk space and generally makes your computer less efficient
[+] [-] XJOKOLAT|11 years ago|reply
Sorry, my experiences have been far worse to the point that I am actively moving away from all things Google.
Not that it will register one iota on their corporate landscape. However, it will make me feel better and work better. And that's what matters.
[+] [-] chulk90|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|11 years ago|reply
Basically, a shareware vendor will have their AdWords account suspended with some harsh wording and the stated reason would be that the website doesn't have either (a) uninstall instructions next to the download button (b) terms and conditions next to the download button (c) the software is of "unwanted" type (d) some other random thing (that was A-OK before) not being quite up to sniff. All in all, it looks just some random nitpicking that will go away only if the matter is escalated, which takes several weeks to process. The general sentiment seems to be that Google no longer gives a flying f*ck about smaller AdWords customers and/or some run-away manager is basically having a field day with enforcing arbitrary clauses of their AdWords T&C.
What's going on in reality - nobody knows because of how "open" and communicative on the issue Google is.
[+] [-] skymt|11 years ago|reply
I'm the "computer geek" for some friends and family, so I've fixed up a good number of PCs, and AdWords has been by far the #1 vector for malware. A lot of people in my position just started installing ad blockers on every PC they work on, to save trouble later. Google's new approach has a lot of problems, obviously, but they're not just power-tripping.
[+] [-] tankenmate|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timothya|11 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/
[1]: https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
[+] [-] oh_sigh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitherfield|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|11 years ago|reply
Remember, people in support are used to a somewhat hostile tone. People get in touch when something is wrong, and so it's fairly common for people to be frustrated. If they just responded with "sorry, can't help you" to every support query with a slightly hostile tone, they wouldn't be providing much support.
And yes, it is also good to try and assume good faith and not vent your frustration at a support person who had nothing to do with whatever issue it is that you're frustrated about. But it's a fact of life in support that you'll have to deal with some unhappy people, so you need to be able to deal with it.
[+] [-] kuschku|11 years ago|reply
Or the fact that you have to show the EULA before the download – which is also not really helpful in any way.
These rules don’t really help either side (as people producing malicious ads can still do so, but people doing honest ads have to comply with rules that don’t help at all), but add more stress for both sides.
[+] [-] hartator|11 years ago|reply
That's said Google is going down hill for a while now.
[+] [-] konstruktor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wasyl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tw04|11 years ago|reply
I get you're mad at "google", but taking it out on an employee tasked with helping fix your issues is kind of like being an asshole to a waitress...
[+] [-] byuu|11 years ago|reply
But I think it's pretty reasonable that someone's going to be upset after receiving a no-notice suspension e-mail after spending a million dollars with a company. It's pocket change to Google, sure, but that's a lifetime's income for a lot of us.
Speaking as someone who worked in AOL's billing department in 2000-2002, I can say that we all know very well not to take this stuff personally. It's just what the job is, and it's not for the feint of heart.
I'd love it if everyone were nicer too, but I can easily put myself in their shoes in cases like this.
Now the people that were 100x ruder to me on a personal level over a $20 charge on their dialup account that was (often) their own fault? Not quite as much sympathy there :P
[+] [-] codexon|11 years ago|reply
Making your displeasure known to at least 1 person who works there gets your message across better than sucking it up and letting them think it isn't really such a big deal.
[+] [-] varelse|11 years ago|reply
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-...
And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality.
I find this frustrating because I hate Google for its A/B testing and blind-allocated mediocrity, and yet, everything else continues to be worse. It's like being married to someone you truly despise (at least for me, your mileage may vary).
I really don't get why no one can disrupt them. But clearly they can't...
[+] [-] lazyjones|11 years ago|reply
YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.
[+] [-] bad_user|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learnstats2|11 years ago|reply
Every existing search engine that I'm aware of is essentially based on the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created.
At the time it was created, it was not obvious that it was the best option - only that it was better than AltaVista's algorithm and Yahoo's curated portal model that were the options in 1999.
Why are search engines not innovating? Or, if they are, where are they?
[+] [-] davidgerard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cordite|11 years ago|reply
Telling someone they aren't presentable isn't the same as telling a mostly well dressed person that the host wants them to wear dark socks with their dress shoes instead of white socks. (Hopefully this analogy is fitting.)
[+] [-] wavefunction|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaadd33|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponytech|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frade33|11 years ago|reply
the only response i wrote back was, I have no intentions either, of paying my money to a company that has little to no respect to its customers.
I got back instant response and got my account reinstated, but, still I didn't agree, I asked him, I need written apology from the head manager, the support person apologized for this, and said the head manager is traveling overseas. So I accepted.
I never asked the reason why they did it in the first place. I was just furious, you don't say fuck off to your customers, without first talking to them.
[+] [-] brohoolio|11 years ago|reply
I'm surprised you had a good resolution.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|11 years ago|reply
Re "How do I uninstall this?" Google Cloud Print appeared to be, at least on Win XP a couple of years ago and when set up to share a non-Cloud-Print-native printer, a one-way process. That borked non-Cloud printing (how the printer used to work; functionality that was desired to continue) pretty thoroughly.
I like a lot of things about Google and their products. However, lack of communication on topics such as these more than borders on arrogance.
P.S. OT, but: And where is Lolipop for my 2013 Moto-X (then a Google product) from Verizon. I bought it in good part because, unlike other Verizon mobile products, timely updates were "promised" strongly as part of the marketing and promotion. (And yeah, I need Verizon for specific reasons...)
Now? Bupkiss. With the better part of a year left on my two-year contract (that I entered hesitantly but again, at least with this "promise" as some comfort/reassurance).
Google is enormously selective in their "support" and not infrequently refuses to go out of their way when it does not support the initiative du jour.
(E.g. but not only nor primarily, insisting the pressure stay on Verizon to apply these updates.)
[+] [-] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
Also, I think "unwanted software" is a bit opaque; what they really mean is software Google doesn't want, not necessarily the user.
[+] [-] omnibrain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mdekkers|11 years ago|reply