But why didn't you do that all the previous times?

- 13 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 "On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given. I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799 and it was happening often enough to be a meme then with people saying: "And this time I'd like the outcome of this thread not to be just "A Google insider wandered past and fixed this guys problem" but "Here's how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again." and "This is a general problem with Google and their customer-no-service attitude. It's just deplorable. It really is. You have to wonder: What is it going to take for them to give a shit and actually do something about it?"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217549 "Ask HN: Why doesn't Google believe in customer support?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022091 "Ask HN: How to reach _real_ people at Google?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5120060 "My Gmail account got hacked. Google won't help. I need your advice."

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851448 "Help HN: Cannot recover my Google Adsense because of single 1$ mistake"

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569902 "Ask HN: Is it possible to get help from a Google employee?(for G+)"

- 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13874778 "We accediently created a personal google account using G Suite's main account, and without any warning Google just removed all of our access to a very sensitive data for our organization."

- 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20203482 "SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help", comment: "Google really fails hard in the face of providing support when issues like this occur."

That's a quick search of "help google account" in the HN search down at the bottom of the page, just submissions not comments. Comments immediately comes up with "Xoogler here - actually we used to say "if you are not buying advertising from us, Google can't help you at all"." - joering2, two days ago.

Or this anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053549 steelframe is telling about Google "After they hung up on [a paying customer] 3 or 4 times, eventually a manager got on the phone and told him (between his screams), "Look, you're not getting any phone support because it doesn't exist. There's nowhere for us to transfer you. There's nobody who can call you back about this. Your only option is to search the forums for an answer to your problem. I am going to terminate this call now. Sir, I'm going to terminate this call. No, we can't help you. Nobody at Google can help you. I am terminating this call now. We asked you to stop calling this number. Do not call us again. <click>""

And don't forget https://killedbygoogle.com/ for products people liked which they shuttered because reasons, most commonly exemplified by Google (RSS) Reader 9 years ago which still comes up in comments present day.

Well, GOOG's share price has tripled in the last 5 years, so that's how much people are staying away from them as a result.