I disagree. The amount of people they'd have to hire to support that 1% of their users could make the service untenable as free to the rest of us.
In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve.
If I give rakes out to 100 people, should I have to hire staff to fix the ones that break? No. I gave them something for free. If they don't like it, they can go somewhere else. If they buy a rake, then they'll get a warranty, and be entitled to speak to a human about it.
To your point directly though, it IS an excuse to provide shitty service, if they did that. As you said, it's beautiful and perfect for more than 99% of their customers.
People depend heavily on these services. Google does not discourage them. I would love it if the front page of gmail.com read like:
"EASY COME, EASY GO
Gmail is a quick and dirty email service for people who don't really need reliable access. Please do not bother signing up unless it does not matter whether you lose the address and all your email."
I think that would begin to resolve the problem being highlighted here for sure.
OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”.
Of course this is standard CYA legal boilerplate and from the perspective of most users, it might as well be posted behind the refrigerator.
If they put that right on the front page in big letters, replacing the current brags about how awesome it is and how it makes your life easier, then that would filter out most of the users who are clueless enough to get in serious trouble this way.
Like big nasty warning messages on cigarettes.
Of course that's not helpful to Google, but if Google can't be expected to look out for public interests at all then it isn't anyone else's business to look out for Google's either.
That argument assumes that Google email is crap. It isn't, it is the best email client I've used (online or off), and they have every right to be proud of it.
Does it break sometimes? Sure. What doesn't?
Does that make it a smelly pile of crap? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people would agree that it is.
Gmail is a really awesome service that doesn't have the best support. Period. If people can't be bothered to look at the terms, or if they have greater expectations of the service than they should well, that's on them. I don't think circumstances are so dire that they should plaster "Really, we suck" on their homepage, especially as they're better than all their competition that I've seen.
Well correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you have maintained that since it's a free service one should not expect reliable access or even a dime to be spent in dire circumstances outside your control; and you have further argued that Google is telling us the same thing in the terms (however inefficient the medium).
If it is or were the case, that Gmail is not even supposed to be reliable, then might be very pretty and convenient as you please (hence, not a smelly pile of crap, as one might believe from the terms) but still ultimately bad for most people. Particularly the people who are least equipped to judge the risks or recover from the mistake, because IMAP is Greek to them.
So even as apology for Google I think this is a fruitless line of argument, no disrespect intended. I do respect your opinions.
My own feelings are more nuanced than what I think you are probably fighting hardest against (round condemnation of Google as evil, or Gmail as unusable). I personally think there are safe and constructive uses for Gmail, cigarettes, hard liquor, cars, pornography and pistols and informed adults should have ready access to all these. But I think as a matter of personal conscience it's better not to be a dick, and it's better long-term business, and I'm not against leverage being applied to make Google iron out this procedure or be more firmly up-front with the scary disclaimers that probably should be scaring away people who are not wise consenting adults. Again assuming that Gmail is operating on this sort of Libertarian-style principle that they are not even slightly and socially obligated to provide reliable service no matter how much they promote the product for wide and general use.
In the interest of clarification, my hardheaded response originated from classifying 'lack of support' as evil. That was my bone, and now it's pretty much picked clean.
I do happen to think that Gmail is an exceptionally good mail service, though that is obviously just my opinion. I think statistics would agree that it is a fairly reliable service. Reliable enough that it doesn't need to be disclaimed as "We're just messing around here really" on the home page. Nor am I willing to necessarily concede that it is 'bad for most people'.
In a nutshell, I would say that it's a great service if you can agree with its terms. This isn't mail that people are generally paying tons of money for, and I think their expectations are out of sync with reality. The general argument I hear is "BUT MY LIFE IS IN THAT EMAIL". If that's the case, gmail wasn't probably the email service you were supposed to be using, at least not for free, in the same way I don't store my valuables under the rock in the garden. If it mattered that much, you shouldn't have entrusted it to a service that didn't have a support policy more in line with your expectations.
I have gmail, and I'll concede that it would be inconvenient if they turned off my access tomorrow, but I keep all my more pressing correspondence to services that I have a good-faith belief will give a shit if I lose my information. If google apps were shutting people off, I would expect people to be upset, and I would not consider that ire as meritless.
My only real complaint with the post you've just made is the assertion that Google doesn't care to provide any service whatsoever. If they didn't care about providing reliable service, then it probably wouldn't be so reliable. I personally have experienced maybe two or three outages since I joined the Beta however many years ago. Those were global outages, or at least wide-spread. That sort of thing generally doesn't happen any more. In addition, it's not as though swarms of people are having their accounts disconnected every day. We keep bandying about the 99% number, but I really suspect that it's probably more like 99.99%, but that .01% is enough people that we still hear about it.
Some of this is opinion, and some of my argument is diminished by Google's people support in general, but I think it's getting short shrift because of these rare occasions, and I think that it's considered on the same scale as when Paypal freezes someone's account, which I think is unfair.
Your rake analogy is not sound. Ok so Google gives Gmail for free - as in you don't need to pay for it.
But is it really "free"? No.
They parse your emails so they know what you are buying/selling, who you are talking to, what sites you have a membership on, etc. They also use Gmail to display ads (based off of the things they learned from your emails) to make money off of you. They probably do other things i'm not even thinking of right now. So is it really free? Not at all. Is it a great source of information about you (to then be used by them to target ads at you)? Absolutely.
They should be providing support for it. I don't know what that support should look like (be it a call center, forums, etc), but I definitely think that if I give Google permission to snoop through my personal email so they can build better ads for me (which is how they make the majority of their money) I expect some damn support.
The source code would be more helpful, since a thousand companies would already be competing for the privilege to provide basic support to individual users.
Comparing email, adsense, etc. to rakes is flawed. (Please, don't persuade me otherwise.)
I agree that the gmail economic model might not be feasible if support costs were included. But I don't know that numbers so my agreement is not important.
If 99% of users have no problem with google's services currently then, X% have no problem with google's services in the future. I'm not sure how to solve for X.
I don't necessarily disagree, but the assumption that not providing support on a free service is evil is the more flawed idea, I think.
Also, as I recently discovered, Google does have a for-pay phone support service for Gmail users, as well as all the other forms of support they offer in the form of message board, how tos, google groups, etc.
In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve.
If I give rakes out to 100 people, should I have to hire staff to fix the ones that break? No. I gave them something for free. If they don't like it, they can go somewhere else. If they buy a rake, then they'll get a warranty, and be entitled to speak to a human about it.
To your point directly though, it IS an excuse to provide shitty service, if they did that. As you said, it's beautiful and perfect for more than 99% of their customers.