Have you considered what Google does with money they save by not employing a team of tens of thousands of customer support personnel?
It makes no difference to me whether they use it to improve AdWords, maintain their 35% margins, buy their own airline, employ brilliant PhDs, give free massages and chocolate icecream to everyone, or underwrite non-profitable products like everything Google does which isn't search/AdSense. All I want is for the thing that I pay money for to work. I'm practically begging for them to take my money.
They have similar plans in the Enterprise segment. For integrating GMail and Google docs with your website, and for building your own custom apps for the same.
I'd like information/opinions anyone has to share on the real availability and quality of that support.
And what qualifies as "Enterprise"? If you've 15 Google Apps seats and are paying your $50/year/seat, do you actually get useful responses in a timely manner?
(It seems those dollar amounts would be well below anything "Enterprise". But I figure the multiple-thousand-seat clients are getting support from somewhere. Maybe this means the small fish who pay, can actually get some level of response?)
I had 3 paid seats (now 11) when I contacted Google support regarding a hosted Apps account. I received a response fairly quickly (within a few hours), a response and resolution within 10 minutes of replying to the initial support email follow-up, and I continued to have a discussion and further support responses from the same person over the next few days.
So I'd say absolutely that my $150 bought me a name and a face and good support.
They also have phone support, but I have not used it.
As I understand his argument, he claims the extra money Google would need to spend in order to satisfy his needs, would cause at least as much increased revenue from his increased Adsense use (or if not from him alone, at least from people like him).
It makes no difference to me whether they use it to improve AdWords, maintain their 35% margins, buy their own airline, employ brilliant PhDs, give free massages and chocolate icecream to everyone, or underwrite non-profitable products like everything Google does which isn't search/AdSense. All I want is for the thing that I pay money for to work. I'm practically begging for them to take my money.