Beta and COGS

I had a problem with my Google Calendar this morning that raised an interesting question for me. Google makes its money as an advertising company, offers numerous "free" software services to push ads competing with Microsoft, Adobe, and Yahoo. GOOG often competes with telecom providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. The interesting thing is they don't provide the same customer support that all of those companies do at the same level and instead rely on customers to self-support. There was no one to send an email to or ask a question or log a ticket. While they are not normally helpful, Google's competitors do offer these outlets for exception handling like my issue.

Some people would say that this self-support model is emblematic of Web 2.0. That may be true but I like to think I am a little more swift with technology things than most people. I checked the users blogs, faqs, online help, some guy had the same or similar question about 1 month ago and there was no answer either. Otherwise there was no help. Most people would probably breakdown if this happened to them. Or call AT&T like me. At 10 cents a message for most people, there can be a tangible impact those these issues besides lost productivity.

If I had some time I would like to look at the service COGS (cost of goods sold) for each of these companies. Normally, companies like AT&T don't put services costs in the income statement but sometimes companies due place it in their supplementary filings. It would be interesting to see how Google's competitors expense this versus Google. Since so many of Google's consumer services are "beta" they probably get away with very little, for now. Of note, Google Mail is in beta after nearly four years in operation. Brilliant! I am sure their competitors are questioning their extensive CS organizations.

As for the interesting problem this morning, I started getting text messages from Google Calendar for a monthly finance reminder that I have set up. Normally the calendar sends only one message reminder. This morning it send one and continued to do so every 5-6 minutes. I erased the series of events from the calendar in Google and my Blackberry. I deleted my phone number from the mobile setup portion of Google Calendar. I still continued to receive the message every 10 minutes or so from Google. I called AT&T to see if they could block the sender. Apparently you have to buy a "stalker package" from AT&T to block certain for $4.95 per month. It does not pay to be popular sometimes!




Eventually I had to reply to the text message with a "stop" response. The first time I tried it I got a response that my number was not registered. I went back, replace my telephone number, reregistered, than sent the "stop" response again. That seems to have fixed it. All that and it took me about 45 minutes all together. I am sure that helped Google's bottom line.