Gmail team, you out there?

Hey Matt Cutts, if you read this please if you can inform to the Blogger team that Hello / BloggerBot for 1 week are having difficultiues when someone trying to upload photos to blogspot blogs much users are affected and there are no response. More info in http://groups.google.com/group/PicasaSomethingBroken/browse_thread/thread/02bbc0452b41c5d2/61f2c8e4597e15c1#61f2c8e4597e15c1

They are all busy watching YouTube these days.

Good luck getting your account back.

If any company is going to beat Google, they will beat them with customer service.

Google really needs to bring in fresh, outside, customer focused leadership or their brand will start to decline.

Maybe this is occuring because their HR department doesn’t work too well, in fact it mistates the facts to their own internal employees trying to help with referrals, but that is a topic for another conversation.

Uh, Robert? That’s a woman’s blog…

FTB: “Posted by Rebellin Woman at October 12, 2006 09:42 PM”

Just goes to show how everyone is considered to be male on the Web until proven otherwise. (Even after I switched my name on Slashdot to SlashChick, I still got replies saying “He said…”)

Gmail is still in beta, so Google feels no obligation to deal with problems or respond to customers. That’s why they keep things in “beta” for so long.

Maryam was posing as you on Messenger last night when I sent you (her, I suppose) an IM about this last night. Did she tell you about that this morning?

Six little words: you – get – what- you – pay – for.

Paid-for hosted e-mail, with: many more features than gmail (including IMAP); better reliability; and good customer service, is available for less than $40 per year.

@8. EXACTLY. Why should anyone expect Google to invest in supporting a free product? Now I suppose you could make the case that Google suffers in the long run by getting less ad views because of the bad service. But, I’m sure having a small percentage of people having problems with gmail is worth not having to invest in a money losing operation like support.

The real question to ask is why someone is not willing to PAY FOR an email service if that email address is important to them.

@5. Yet another example of Scoble reading the first two sentences of something and thinking he groks it.

The problem isn’t necessarily the lack of support for a free product. It’s the hypocrisy of braggins about security when the this incident shows they don’t give a damn about security.

LayZ: I had about 90 seconds in between flights and missed that. Glad you are so helpful. I can’t wait for you to start a blog and for you to make a mistake. You must be Jesus since you’re always so perfect.

So much for ‘don’t be evil’.

Aaron: yeah. Actually the IM window was still on my screen when we got to Washington DC, which is why I blogged it.

Three fingers point back at us when one points to the faults in others.

Robert,

If you were not so boring, we would go somewhere else. ; ) Right? How about a pre-Scoble post? Your editors/ critics could rip you first in pre-post.
Always a good read. Thanks for the Technical stuff without the fluff.

Russ: funny idea! Maybe I should just do a post called “the many flaws of Scoble” and leave it blank so LayZ could fill in all the blanks.

Greensboro? I just moved to Greensboro for a job (MSFT) … too bad I didn’t know about this event sooner! Have a great talk, be sure to post about it.

LayZ, are you really Techno Jesus?

Robert it’s funny you are “calling Matt Cutts” on this and I know it’s probably just fun blog tag game, but it brings up a growing challenge at Google which is that Matt, a very high level guy over there, and a handful of others are the public face of Google.

I think they are mistaken not to invest in a big support infrastructure, but it sure seems to be working so far.

Scoble,

The main reason I don’t like journalist (and I prefer bloggers) is that they tend to write about problems they don’t understand (in my own little Europe at least); the bloggers (whose stream I read) tend to stay on topics they master. From my point of view, you are getting closer to that line; do more background work: the less and the better your post, the more appreciated your blog.

I’ve been active on most Gmail Help forums, and they are two things you learn from there:

- most users are really clueless, and a fair share is pissed and plain rude: I mean, more than the usual forum. I’d love to reply “RTFM” most if the time, but there is little doubt most won’t get it, and in any case, it wouldn’t help; typing always the same advice, and instead of getting thanks, having more newbies yelling their ignorance out (instead of reading previous post) is boring–this tends to get on everyone’s nerve. I am studying user’s appreciation, so to me its a goldmine, but for the coders, it must be though; their response pattern tend to concurr that too (nice, nice, not so, not, away for a while, and back nice).

- most demands are watched, very rapidly, but usually without comments: instead of explictely caring about individual users, Google approach is very much not “humane”: they do it, in the code—because that’s the fairest, simplest way to do it, and the obvous one for developers. Make a fine product, make it better; no need for PR if you are doing your job. I tend to prefer this approach: I don’t want to pay more (or have more ads in that case) to have a guy that failed a carrier in marketing explaining to me what I should do when I am simply mentioning a clearly isolated bug (and hope nothing but ot have it corected whenver it tops a priority list that has to be secret). And I realy prefer to know a good coder is working on something no one can replace him with. Most users complain about this attitude: no phone lines, no human speaking. I try to reasure people, and tell them they are listening—but they are not coming back with a smile, nope.

They are tricks though: if you mail about an error, you get an automated message; most people seem to get upset by geting a receipt confirmation. If the problem needs help, someone usually explain that replying to this message will get you “a real person” (That ridiculous, as the first message has been red already, simply not replied to).

In this particular case, Google is not responsible: that person probably got a key-stoke logger, an easy-to-crack password… Neither case is covered by any digital service. What update should any service do in that instance? What line of code to change? Gmail developpers are certainly useless in that case. What proof do they have that the plaintiff is actually the user? Hint: they are not allowed to look into the account at any case, and the hacker knows about the private question, and all the messages.

Their apparently are heavily under-staffed: how many more people will they need to hire (and they have issues hiring, because of their demanding process) to deal with a problem they are not responsible for? On a Beta service that comes wihtout any warranty?

Of course legal is for a**hole lawyers—but it’s more than that from Google point of view: they claim, they know the product is not fully ready—and that case proves it is not. They might need to come up with additional security for a service most people will use for storring all they really sensitive info.

On the short term, or without such a solution, should they lower they hiring standards because their users are clueless about computer security? I’m not trying to be offensive, but to underline teh debate.

Their way to do it is (as they have done already) make the simplest and decisive advise on how to avoid those problems; the day someone abide those and get into trouble, they will adapt. So far, their legal waiver pages have been the only one I read; they care about making those things clear.

They think in large numbers—and they have to—do they think about the one? I don’t know: if they do, it’s behind the scene (I received private messages from them, not important stuff; but the point is they do it.)—but I beleive they do, as all cases tend to go quiet after less than a week.

On a personal note: I am very upset to read someone who thinks that she can bother someone as busy as a VP for a problem anyone can appreciate. Senior executives are for though calls; this demands at most interviews to identify the hacking technique. Three days is long whit your ID stolen—but not from a over-worked professional point of view. Sending 11 applications won’t help that–it simply sends the message “I’m not ready to deal with that serious situation cold-headed”, i. e. the wrong messsage. If I had to deal with several of those issues, I’d prefer to have this case wait for her to cool down. I know it’s wrong: I actually tend to go for the most upset first, in the forum and in life—but you can’t blame folks from Google for their attitude and come up with a bad one.

Last point: all the cases of suspected Gmail ID theft that I have hear about on the forum are related to Paypal; I think that is odd—and I’d like to have an idea on witch one is the easier to compromise, and some statistic on how many of those had the same password for both.

bertilhatt,

If Google will care about security – they will offer real password restore service.

Like a automated dialing of phone number user has specified for password restore.

Or blacklisting/graylisting IPs used to access hacked accounts.

There are a lot of things that company can do to protect their customers – even if those are “stupid users” who got some virus/keylogger installed every week (as those are 90%+ of Internet population).

@16. Well, like they say…the first path to improvement and recovery is admitting your flaws.

I am not sure the phone thing would work for any country: remember it’s a global company—they have to consider phone lines being spied on by totalitarian regimes, for instance; but such an opt-in feature might help (and I can imagine from other deatils that their already are moving there). Hackers tend to know they should use IP shells.

But again, I’m definitely not a security consultant. If you have a clear idea on hos this works, you certainly can offer them to use that (in a very cold and anonimous on-line form): the average suggestion to update time is extremely short.

Oh: and, for Google, “customers” are called “users”. I was not trying to put them down, but to offer a possible developper’s perspective, and mostly to point out that Gmail was facing a unique situation, of having people ready to store all their personal information in one place—while the closest equivalent, Paypal, can rely on a banking system that can react, Google see yet another limit to being such a lean company.

They certainly need to come up with a solution, but I for one would rather have Sheryl Sandberg think about how to make a sensitive long-term solution, that spending the same time quieting someone upset. The irony is that the Google Toolbar anti-phising feature as saved thousands of other sites.

Last (Sorry to take so much space)
I can’t find her being anywhere around Gmail-User, the official help forum you can reach by clicking on “Help” in Gmail, or find with a simple search.
There she might have noticed that several uses have been experiencing some access issues.

@19. You saying two things. It is risky to have your life online. Esp, if the host company does not want to cover you for your problems. Anybody’s account could be hacked, no matter how clever he/she is. Second thing you are saying is that it is okay to ignore customer’s problem in case these problems are customer generated.

Fortunately Microsoft does not think way. Microsoft otherwise could blame users for all the hacks happen with Windows. Not all users are geeky like you. Microsoft instead tries to follow a multi-prong approach. Educate users. Of course, it is not possible to educate all users in 5, 10 of even 50 years. So try to create systems to protect users. You know, majority of IE attacks won’t harm “educated” users. Do you believe Microsoft should say, why that users downloaded the infected image? As in Google case, I am sure even Microsoft’s lawyers must have covered Microsoft, in case if Microsoft decides to ignore customers fault. No Microsoft does not hide behind these term of conditions. These are for Microsoft’s protection in the court of law. In the market it is the satisfaction and understanding of users which bring them back.

Therefore, Microsoft tries to cover users. They try to fix faults and provide patches. They even try to find the hackers and deal with them according to the law of the land.

In a case, if you need to contact them, they respond with their best ability. This is true even for the free products. My wife wrote hotmail customer service several time. After getting an initial automated response she always got a human’s response.

One way is to blame users and say that highly qualified PhD employees do not deal with low level customer service issues. Another way is to actually try to feel the pain of the users, of every single of them. No company is ideal. But a company who tries to follow the latter has a far longer lifetime than a company who tries to follow the former.

Disclaimer: The commentator is a Microsoft employee. The opinion expressed is his own based on his observation of Microsoft from inside as as from outside.

Kamal,
You misread me: I was not trying to say Google’s attitude is right, or the best–just that they see things differently. Their perspective collides with an increasingly personal on-line information. I certainly never though of anything close to “highly qualified PhD employees do not deal with low level customer service issues”: they do, in what they think is a more efficient way.

They want to organize the world’s knowledge and only have a few thousand employees: no way to handle that without pushing automation and algorithms to their limit. Using Google is assuming an CS PhD can do better because his code is brilliant, and with a more functional UI, because few company have such a large of they efforts toward that. What proved relevant for search (e.g. against Yahoo! human inventory and inded thematic indexes) demands a different attitude regarding bugs too: you need to write, and accept a better answer demands more time. Bad patching is faster, but not preferable. Coders don’t answer the phone: they do the job silently; with intimacy involved, this can trigger very violent reactions. Sending 11 reports for one incident is the kind of attitude that kills the direct relation with the developpers Google pionnered, and pushes toward more red-tape.

Saying “Look: she’s not happy!” misses that aspect. I’m not neglecting the consumer rage, or the effort to educate them; I just think these need to be compared to what they trigger. And I’d be happy to measure how much Google taugh to common users and compare.

Take the recent Facebook trainwreck: if they’d try to calm down, abide the demands, come right away to the window, the idea of having feeds in a SNS would be dead. They prefered to go in favor of the best service (because, somehow, they were able to know better) and think about it, and code like mad for three days—and come up (a little late) with the over-all best solutions. Some users still wanted to have the whole thing shut down; but instead of going for the loudest, they went for what they experience told them was the long-term.

People complain Google maintains things in Beta “too long”: this could be one of the reason why.

What I would be tempted to think is that there are some updates on Gmail security procedures, not all go so well, and some log-ins don’t work (see the forum); what goes behing the scene might be too big for this isolated case to get the priority. She also might have over-interpreted a failed log-in; this won’t prevent here from receiving a personal response–but not just now, maybe.

I do not want to say anything personal about Microsoft patches policy, or customer relations; but anyone around me (including my computer-illiterate mom) could tell you that what you describe is very very different than most people’s experience. Or rather, to sound positive: let’s say the quality of Microsoft products lead me to learn far more on computer inner workings than I would have expected.

(Funny enough, I’ve been looking on Hotmail.com, and couldn’t find any form to fill in case of a ID theft)