A little about me first. I was an apple supporter for nearly 8 years, owning much of their then-ecosystem, including several iphones, macbook air, iMac etc. Although I was always impressed with both their hardware and software, I was getting frustrated with planned obsolescence, and started moving over to android devices, where the price point is easier, but the options are greater. Over the past 5 years or so, I've specifically been supporting the google ecosystem, with pixels, google devices etc, as well as subscriptions to google one and youtube music premium. Clearly, we have a lot of options in this space (Spotify, Amazon etc), but I was convinced that they were a player similar to apple and amazon, and that the cross-device synchrony would work better. More recently, I'm realizing they're not in the same league, and moreoever, they're not really a customer-focused company at all. " Of course!", you might exclaim, "they're after your data to sell and don't care about you a customer!". Well, perhaps my bad.

So, about my experience. I ordered a pixel 6 on Oct 25th. I still await the glorious device now on Dec 21st Yes, a first-world problem (but that's where I live), but instead of just telling me upon ordering it that it was functionally back-ordered (and therefore we'll let you know if something changes), they've been stringing me along with customer service agents telling me that the dates being fed from their AI supply chains are accurate, just to find that within 24 hours they've moved forward again. Am I even complaining to a human? Is the google customer service rep (x 4 now), just a machine stringing me along with "sorry, the device is popular". I guess they mean, "we're just google"? What could they possibly know about inventory, tracking or linking and order to a box somewhere? I guess nothing, as tracking things or data aren't really their business. Huh? More problematically, I can't get a hold of anyone from the google store, seemingly any time of day, even via chat. All agents are busy all the time. Call back? Nope. Email follow-up. Nope. You're just paralyzed hoping to get their attention I guess.

I'm being cheeky, of course. They've instead hired a factory of workers who are paid to be pleasant, but who can only know what the machine tells them. As a loyal customer who has put a lot of cash directly into google, they don't seem to actually have a sense of loyalty to connect their old customers with new products, or apparently the ability to accurately report when things they make will show up. I'm actually a patient person and in the middle of pandemic, understand there are delays. But google, you're google and you should know better in general, and know better than to tell your customers one thing, and do another. Breaking trust with expectations is exactly how you send customers with money and an interest in your new products to other companies and their new products. Ironically, I'm not upset that you can't seem to seem to deliver, I'm upset you're not being transparent about it.