NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.
Why I dumped Google Checkout
Customers who order from me can no longer pay by Google Checkout. Why did I dump them? Gee whiz, where do I begin?
Google suffers from the “We're #1, so we don't have to try” syndrome. They value their time, but not their users' time, which they have zero respect for. When I was still dumb enough to do business with a company too big to care, every time I received an e-mail from Google notifying me of an order, they sent the message as soon as the order was initiated, not completed! That makes no sense; no online merchant needs to know when an order is initiated; we need to know that the order was completed with a valid credit card. Google never sent a message to inform me that an order was completed, so if the customer's card wasn't valid, or the order wasn't yet confirmed by the customer, I'd need to log in to Google (often repeatedly) to see if the order was completed or not.
Logging into Google Checkout was needlessly byzantine. I'd log in, click on a Google Checkout link, then click a couple more links before I could see my orders. Shortly before they began integrating Checkout with Google Wallet, I'd always need to enter my password again, seconds after I'd already logged in. For several days, I and many others couldn't find our orders; in transitioning to Wallet, Google was acting as if their services were used only to pay money, not receive it.
Google also wasted many hours of my time by not offering any automated way for customers to access downloadable books as soon as they pay (something many other online payment services do, but not PayPal, the other too-big-to-care payment service). Hence, I'd need to check my e-mail multiple times per day and send individual messages to customers to give them book download links.
Whenever Google changes its user agreement, it forces us to read the entire lengthy document, searching for what's changed. If Google had even a bit of concern for user time, it would point out the changes, which might be one new sentence or paragraph in a sea of small print.
Google has another very unpleasant surprise for merchants who do business with them: at the end of each year, the merchant must manually add up each sale to determine his or her total yearly income, with another total for in-state sales to calculate sales tax due! This is a ridiculous waste of time that manifests Google's arrogance; they think so much of themselves, and so little of its users. The data for those calculations is already in their database; they just need to have a programmer give users a page on which they could access their yearly sales reports.
I hope that Google's programmers know much more than I do, and can program faster than me, but even I could write that code in less than a day. Think about it: one programmer working less than one day, or potentially millions of users adding up billions of individual sales EACH AND EVERY YEAR! This is precisely the type of number crunching that databases can easily handle and should handle. In the 21st century, manually adding up such numbers, à la Miss Hathaway in The Beverly Hillbillies, is just plain nuts.
Not only is manually adding up numbers a great way to waste hours, days, or weeks, but it also invites human errors. Cognizant of the potential for error, I add up the numbers two or three times to verify that I added correctly, then—for good measure—I cross my fingers and hope I didn't make a mistake.
One of the many users complaining about this inexcusable omission wrote:
“Well this stinks. I have never heard of a payment processing service which does not provide any sort of report or even summary information. The 30 day "report" you can download is garbage! Come on Google, are you kidding me? I'm supposed to sum up all these micropayments made to me over an entire YEAR myself? What is going on here?”
What is going on is that Google is too big to care. Google prefers that users waste many millions of hours per year every year adding up numbers that a database could calculate in a tiny fraction of a second after one programmer spent a few hours once writing code for that, which is Database 101 stuff.
I've written to Google and PayPal several times over the years, imploring them to do what anyone with common sense would do from Day One: give users year-end total and in-state sales. That's child's play for a database and programmers, but a nightmare for users.
One of the Japanese computer manufacturers is so arrogant that it has the gall to tell disgruntled customers to “go pound sand.” In other words, “get lost,” “go fly a kite,” or “buzz off little peon, we're too big and powerful to listen to you.” Essentially, they are telling justifiably upset customers to fuck off. That's not a wise strategy for dealing with discontentment, yet it is the foremost customer service rule for many big companies: the ones that usually fizzle out.
General Motors once was the most valuable corporation in the world, but it would have gone bankrupt without the massive transfusion of cash from taxpayers. Customers got tired of their products (as an ER doc, I know some of their vehicles are built by people stoned on drugs or have a blood alcohol level about three times the legal limit), and customers also tired of their “go pound sand” customer service.
Microsoft has even worse products and customer service. Predictably, they are slipping and will eventually be a pathetic has-been, like MySpace, once King of the Social Networking Hill, and now about as popular as herpes. Want to buy MySpace at a fire-sale price? Its current owner is looking for a buyer, but they haven't yet found anyone dumb enough to pay for a site seemingly destined for bankruptcy.
Similarly, people will eventually tire of the endless Facebook privacy nightmares, bugs, and hassles that stem from what is likely a manifestation of Zuckerberg's psychopathology and contempt for his users that prompted him to call them “dumb fucks” for trusting him. Facebook's customer service is about as friendly and responsive as the SS in Nazi Germany. Have a problem with Facebook? Zuckerberg doesn't care. To him, you're just a “dumb fuck.” If you tolerate the myriad Facebook annoyances, Zuckerberg might like you more, but respect you even less; to him, such suckers are just the sort of “dumb fucks” he needs.
Then there's Google, with a seemingly endless number of products, and an endless way of annoying, disappointing, frustrating, or screwing its users. But the good news? Google won't tell you to go pound sand. Instead, they probably won't even bother replying to you. They're too busy having a great time with all of the money being thrown at them.
I gave Google chance after chance to get its act together and stop behaving like immature teenagers ignoring their homework, but my patience was exhausted. Google will continue to ride high until it is displaced by an equally or more brilliant company that isn't dumb enough to overlook the small but important details, like year-end sales summaries and caring about people. Ultimately, all businesses are about people, but tech companies frequently forget who made them successful, which often leads to ephemeral success by CEOs who know how to make customers burning mad: treat 'em like dirt.
I'm not going to waste any more of my time with Google because they don't respect my time—or yours.
Notes:
- One of the many examples of Microsoft's ineptitude: To save time in replying to customers, I should be able to save a draft of the message I send for each book, with the subject line and body prefilled and the latter formatted. I can indeed save such a draft, a capability Microsoft has offered for many years, and send it after pasting in the recipient's e-mail address. I can do that, but there's a not-so-little problem: THE LINKS IN THE MESSAGE DON'T WORK! Many others have reported the same problem in Windows Mail and Outlook. I wasted more of my life searching for an explanation for this error and a solution to it, but the fix was so problematic that I chose to bypass it by drafting every e-mail from scratch so their links work OK. For me to need to do this is evidence that the so-called geniuses at Microsoft can't get even basic things right. I could cite thousands of other examples of how their programmers seemed to have undergone common sense lobotomies. In another article, I explained that even Bill Gates is incensed by the junk they sell.
