Y'know, this article isn't about Gmail performance nearly as much as it is another article about Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency.
Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses - but that's it. Google is not interested in hearing about problems, and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it - but in any other case, maybe they're on it, maybe they're not. Who are we to ask?
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"
(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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency
Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take?
And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on BigTable to fix their speed issues?
Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?
Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads.
If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.
I put together my own mail server on Linode a while back, after getting frustrated with Gmail's ridiculously limited filtering and tagging.
I use RoundCube webmail, Dovecot, Postfix, managesieve, SpamAssassin, and a few custom hacks. It works great. Gmail used to have the added annoyance of making Firefox unusably slow if it was open for hours at a time; I now can have my mailbox open for days at a time with no browser performance hit. I can make filters as simple or complex as I want.
But then there are people that have to work a lot and don't want to care.
Ironically, the main product i am working on is enterprise mail solutions. I could deploy somethign at home or in anotehr datacenter.. but even the time for the setup is too much time to bother with. So in the end, i use gmail for private stuff and our corporate mail system for business.
If i'd have the time to setup the toolchain you mentioned including custom hacks, i'd rather go outside or meet friends, for sure. Or work on some other projects..
ah, yes, and when your mail server goes down for a couple hours? that's a lot of fun.
i've managed my own mail servers from ~2000 to 2008, when it practically became a full time job. i use gmail primarily for (1) the spam filter and (2) not having to worry about downtime.
[edit: and on another note, roundcube development is PAINFULLY slow...]
Once I got the basic configuration and initial stuff down, the mail server's uptime has been ... hmm. Pretty damn close to 100% I think. I think there was an outage a bit back, but that one was my fault. I dicked up one of the databases or something.
On the flip side, I never have to worry about missing email. Like, for example, the time (yesterday) that I tried to send code samples from a WP exploit that did a neat job of turning the web server into an IRC-controlled zombie via a fun little Perl script. The person I was sending them to had a Gmail address.
Guess who never received the files? (And wasn't notified, either...)
Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?
No, that would be very difficult. They have only about 20 000 employees. That's 9000 users per employee.
The problem is, the vast majority of those 176 million people have chosen to be in a position where they depend on a service that is run by people who don't care about them personally — who can't care about them, because there are just too many of them. This inevitably means that some of those people, maybe many of them, will get caught in the machine and mangled.
The solution is to provide services like email in a distributed way, instead of with a centralized company. Then, when you have a problem like this, you have access to someone who could plausibly fix it.
The difficulty is that our facilities for providing big centralized servers are leaps and bounds ahead of our facilities for building decentralized applications.
Other people have already commented effectively on the two components of your reply, but let me say that I found the transparency straw man to be the weirder of the two, because that's not how I use that word.
I'd also like to note that from a technical standpoint, I think Google is fantastic. They do great work, I love where they're going with services, and I personally have no complaint with Gmail nor could I improve things were I magically in charge.
But their nearly autistic attitude towards dealing with users is a real problem, and as large as they are, I think they bear a real moral responsibility to make the world a better place. "Don't be evil" is a great motto. I have every reason to believe they try to live up to it. But disengagement from their users to the incredible extent that Google practices it verges dangerously close to evil when it affects so very many people.
A few years ago, I was called in and told that my work machine was pulling huge amounts of data from the net. It eventually turned out that the problem was a buggy version of Google Desktop.
After a fairly intensive search, I found the reason in an obscure Google Groups posting[ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_Something-Brok... ]. I experienced the bug six months after the issue was discussed there, and that was the only source of information I could find.
I don't know if Google has improved its support recently, but the obscure way in which information on the bug was disseminated certainly made me more wary of using Google products after that.
Premier Edition? That includes 24/7 phone support, SLA:s, and a lot more. Why are you paying for something if you haven't even bothered checking what you pay for? Doesn't sound very clever to me...
Read some more. The support is limited in many respects, and does not include the ability to complain about and get resolution on issues of website performance.
Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses - but that's it. Google is not interested in hearing about problems, and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it - but in any other case, maybe they're on it, maybe they're not. Who are we to ask?