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A Google Blunder- the Sad Story of Urchin
Anenome writes "Google has a track record of buying startups and integrating them into its portfolio. But sometimes those acquisitions go terribly wrong, as Ars Technica argues has been the case with Google's 2005 purchase of web-analytics firm Urchin Software Corp. 'In the wake of Google's purchase of the company, inquiring customers (including Ars Technica) were told that support and updates would continue. Companies that had purchased support contracts were expecting version 6 any day, including Ars. What really happened is this: Google focused its attention on Google Analytics, put all updates to Urchin's other products on the back burner, and rolled out a skeleton support team. Everyone who forked over for upgrades via a support contract never got them, even though things weren't supposed to have changed. The support experience has been awful. Since the acquisition, we have had two major issues with Urchin, and neither issue was solved by Google's support team. In fact, with one issue, we were helped up until the point it got difficult, and then the help vanished. The support team literally just stopped responding.'"
Google hates niggers.
Wait, bear with me for a minute.
If it weren't for the constant threat of absolute annihilation at the hands of Microsoft, Google would be free to build and support any number of cool technologies that users would certainly flock to like gays to Apple products.
I haven't personally used the Urchin software, but I have been on the receiving end of bad support, and it has almost without exception been traceable back to the offices in Redmond that each company with bad customer service was forced into it by unwinnable competition with the software giant. There are only so many resources that can be spread between customer support, development, and test. In some cases, some companies can push testing off onto customers (Google and Microsoft itself are prime examples). But most of the time, it takes all a company's got to fight the good fight. Unfortunately, the customer is the loser in almost all cases.