To preface, I do not intend to defend Google nor do I work with them or represent them.
That said, I have been in similar situations with large scale customers. It is hard. Some percentage of customers are pathological, and even after you fix their problem refuse to stop continuing the rumors.
Once it’s fixed, I want all communication forward looking. Some percent of people are flat out insane, incompetent, or just assholes. Sometimes you have to lock the thread in order to stop a conversation about something that is already fixed.
Large scale customer bases are just a different beast. Once you experience it, you know what I mean. That doesn’t mean Google took the right path - only people with a comprehensive perspective can evaluate that, and I’m just some idiot on a forum who knows nothing about the specifics.
Of course. Doing the right thing at the moment is also hard. But that's the right thing. Google is famously under-communicating and opaque, locking a thread is par for the course.
Again, of course, their reputation loss doesn't show on their bottom line. (How would it? They let loose the whole CFO army, and we don't really have the convenience of a randomized trial.) But incidences like these are accumulating the kindling to slowly but surely chip users away from the behemoth.
If you lose customers their data, fail to recover it, and then want all communication to be "forward looking" you are either flat out insane, incompetent or just an asshole.
Or, you realize the past cannot be changed. And the customers who only want to rehash the past, rather than saying “where do we go from here”, are pathological.
If I run a business and someone communicates to me that they are pathological and cannot be satisfied unless I invent a Time Machine, I am not going to be particularly concerned about their outcomes. They’re just not worth it - fire your shitty customers, for the sake of your business and employees.
Only if the number of customers is significant and they are litigious organized and funded.
My point is that any time you have >1M customers, you will have many pathological people whom you don’t want to do business with in the first place. The right amount of “firing your customers” is nonzero. Anyone who has worked in a customer service role has experienced this.
So it's okay to screw those customers because they aren't litigious, organized, and funded?
You fucked over your customers and some of those who were harmed will be rightly furious with you. The solution here is to try and do good by them, not put your head in the sand and treat the them as a percentage!
No wonder people are no longer willing to assume good faith when having to deal with corporations. It's because of people who think like you.
I do think this is an interesting conversation, but would like to request that we remove loaded language like "screwing over" customers.
To me, the primary fact seems to be that Google lost some customers data. We can all agree on that - they should have kept it, but they didn't. They sold a product that, for some number of customers, was defective.
What is their ethical and financial culpability here? To me, if they did their best - if they have industry leading backup/replication technology (which I think they probably do), there really isn't much that CAN be done.
On the customer side - your data has been lost. What should you do in this situation?
My experience leads me to believe that some people, as upset as they are, understand that sometimes shit happens. The other set of these impacted customers do not accept/understand that - they want you to invent a time machine a reverse reality. Barring that, they want your first born plus 10%.
To me, it is perfectly acceptable to tell that second group of people something like this: "I am sorry this happened, despite our planning and efforts. It sucks. We cannot fix it. However, you are also a toxic customer - moving forward you should look to another company to fill those needs."
At the very least, firing those customers will help with your line-employees' quality of life. Yes, shit happens and it sucks - but there are a lot of assholes who only make a situation worse. No matter what you do, you will never make them happy, and trying to make them happy will have great cost.
Those "pathological" customers, I have no problem telling to pound sand.
So it's never OK to intentionally screw customers. But when bad things happen, are people looking for the best available resolution? If not, let them go be jagoffs somewhere else.
Google should definitely refund them some amount of money (both good and bad customers). For the pathological ones, it's a nice way of saying "it's worth paying you to go away".
Most people who know me wouldn't describe me that way. All I'm saying is that some customers are pathological and you'll never please them, so don't try. Put those resources into your healthy relationships.
Pretty sure the person you replied to is saying that Google, did NOT fail to recover it. You should read the post you replied to again, I don't think you understood it.
It could be victim blaming. It could be rational. Have you never been in a situation where a frantic user didn't understand that you gave them the solution to their problem and they just continued lashing out? Sometimes victims are done right by, and they just create victims out of another party.
And someone can be a victim of data loss and simultaneously a bully for trying to harangue Google. Being a victim in one area is not a “get out of being called an asshole” card. Especially when it comes to data loss, where ultimately the data owner is the responsible party.
Victim blaming is problematic in general, I agree. But when “shit happens” (as it did here, assuming nobody think Google deleted the data on purpose), at some point victims become aggressors.
It sucks to lose your data. It might suck more for the Google employees who lost the data. Have a little empathy for both sides - those who don’t can eat rocks.
...I'm sorry; are you saying that it sucks more for the poor Google employees (making mad bank, by the way) because they have to deal with knowing there are angry customers out there that they don't have to interact with anyway because Google outsources that kind of support to community forums...
...than for people who lost months worth of work because they trusted, in good faith, that the platform Google promotes as being a great place to keep your data safe, would keep their data safe?
Maybe the “right” grayhat/blackhat way to handle it is to use high-quality, convincing sock puppet accounts to manufacture consensus against the “conspiracy theorists”. It’s not ethical but its the more effective alternative if you’re already at the point of locking threads where people continue to point out that you still haven't fixed the problem.
Great idea. Google could even use their fake AI to respond in real-time to negative YouTube videos and find the hidden positive user sentiment under a cup.
The part I quote below resonated with me, if you have an email I could reach you at I would like to ask your opinion about how to handle a situation. It is very private.
> I have been in similar situations with large scale customers. It is hard. Some percentage of customers are pathological, and even after you fix their problem refuse to stop continuing the rumors.
>Once it’s fixed, I want all communication forward looking. Some percent of people are flat out insane, incompetent, or just assholes. Sometimes you have to lock the thread in order to stop a conversation about something that is already fixed.
>Large scale customer bases are just a different beast. Once you experience it, you know what I mean. That doesn’t mean Google took the right path - only people with a comprehensive perspective can evaluate that, and I’m just some idiot on a forum who knows nothing about the specifics.
That said, I have been in similar situations with large scale customers. It is hard. Some percentage of customers are pathological, and even after you fix their problem refuse to stop continuing the rumors.
Once it’s fixed, I want all communication forward looking. Some percent of people are flat out insane, incompetent, or just assholes. Sometimes you have to lock the thread in order to stop a conversation about something that is already fixed.
Large scale customer bases are just a different beast. Once you experience it, you know what I mean. That doesn’t mean Google took the right path - only people with a comprehensive perspective can evaluate that, and I’m just some idiot on a forum who knows nothing about the specifics.