What support? There is no support at Google and this is by design. If they had support it would not be possible to offer what Google offers. You are shut down by robot and that decision is final. There is no support. And robots do not tell what you did wrong because this would be knowledge on how to play robots.
I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - will finally end.
No, probably not. Think of how much Google earns per employee. Now think of how much they would earn per support employee. The numbers are probably not even even the same order of magnitude.
Moreover, Google makes money from each mailing list (for example) by displaying ads. The revenue that they bring in from each list is pretty small; the key to their income is the huge number of lists that they support. So losing even 100 lists every week, I have to imagine, wouldn't put much of a dent in their income.
By contrast, the overhead and cost associated with hiring, training, paying (salary + benefits), and supporting an employee are pretty high, particularly when you're offering a commodity product competing with other commodity (and free) products.
From a user's perspective, it seems insane for Google to ignore the business opportunity associated with support. But I have to believe that they've run the math, and that ticking off a number of their customers is cheaper than charging them for decent support.
I doubt that they ever did the math in the sense of estimating the numbers on a piece of paper. Service number for 10 cents a minute * 60 minutes = 6$ an hour. (My old mobile operator charged 15 eurocents per minute!) There is hardly an excuse for no support. Even less considering that these numbers do not include happy non-tech customers.
I'm not saying that this is a desirable situation for users. But I also think it's clear that Google has made a calculated decision -- they want to offer their products for free to as many people as possible, and then avoid supporting them.
I would think that the lesson here isn't that Google should be supporting its products, but rather that people should think twice before using unsupported, free products.
I believe that it was Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who said that if you aren't paying for a product, then you're the product. And indeed, that's what we see with Google: They give away their products in order to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
This doesn't make them an evil company (although perhaps other things do). They have a legitimate business model that seems to work for many people.
Complaining that Google isn't willing to offer support, free or paid, is an indication that your interests and Google's aren't aligned. They're not about to change, so perhaps you shouldn't run your service on their system.
Support is not a boolean atribute. There is a broad range of support intensity from user forums up to in person, on site support. Different services have different levels of appropriate support and the service provider has to decide what level makes sense - and customers have to decide what they need. (Which I admit can be hard to predict.) There was never any promise of strong individual support for this service.
For many products and services the support would be far more expensive than providing the "main" service.
There is a LOT of well deserved space for stuff provided "as-is", with an explicit refusal to do any support at all, but still very useful for the 'customer'. For example, large part of free software.
He's only willing to pay for support when something goes wrong. That does not cover the cost of providing support. It must cover its costs with subscribing members who pay for service even when they don't immediately need it.
Its like healthcare. The system doesn't work if you don't pay when you're healthy and only decide to get coverage when you're sick.
It doesn't necessarily. It's simple to think up of economic models where, just because some people are willing to pay for something, doesn't mean it makes sense for someone to sell it.
In this case, it clearly does not. This type of (completely understandable) bitching has been going on for years, and Google is not changing a thing.
It may be that paid support would be profitable, but still google shouldn't do it. They've openly expressed that their strategy will be only on businesses/products with large ($1B+?) potential, to ensure focus; and killed a number of semi-popular, profitable but "too small" products.
Would paid support for the free stuff even be a rounding error's (on google scale) worth of revenue, much less profit?
Yes, that is true. And I believe they don't have (proper) support even for some paid services, such as App Engine or AdWords. But I was mainly replying to "There is no support at Google".
I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - will finally end.