They have invested heavily over the lifetime of the company in avoiding providing support. That reputation can never be revived.
Google does not have direct customer support in its DNA, it has the opposite, whatever that is.
They have not demonstrated relentless commitment to being available to resolve issues, and nothing matters more than this if you've bet your company on their platform.
If something goes really wrong. Amazon has your back and you'll find someone who'll listen who has the power to resolve it. Google, you're stuffed. If you've built you're business around that thing that went wrong, well time for regret.
Personally, this has not been my experience of the Firebase team actually - for me they have always gone out of their way to help find solutions and give all kinds of advice.
It started out with outstanding software support for the most popular platforms but now it doesn't.
Develop an application in ReactJs? Stripe hand wave: ahh go build your own solution or use some third party thing somewhere over there in "the community, sure you can trust it".....whatever, we're busy, and ReactJs, hmmm haven't heard of that.
The article specifically says this is not the case, and that it actually increased health care spending.
Here's the quote.
In a 1995 paper in Health Affairs, William Hsiao looked at how health spending fared in Singapore before and after the introduction of Medisave. He found that health care spending increased after the introduction of increased cost-sharing, which is not what most proponents of such changes would expect.
Further into the article, they also mention that there are a lot of government regulations about proportions of high-class beds to lower-class ones, needing approval to buy expensive medical equipment, and the number of physicians.
From the end of the article:
> [American] Conservatives will point to the Medisave accounts and the emphasis on individual contributions, but ignore the heavy government involvement and regulation. Liberals will point to the public’s ability to hold down costs and achieve quality, but ignore the class system or the system’s reliance on individual decision-making.
My understanding is that overuse is one of the primary reasons health spending is so high in most countries.
No data to back it up, might be wrong.
I can tell you I absolutely loathe pouring money into health insurers to prop up an overused and wasteful system. I'd much rather something like this personal account idea.
Surely this has completely destroyed the value of this software.
Hard to imagine any good software written by HP anyway.
Don't they employ lowest cost programmers? Heck the probably designed it using UML or something silly like that, with hundreds of business analysts and vast numbers of stakeholder meetings all working to reach consensus, before getting all those lowest cost programmers to try to write what they think the spec might mean - all truly inspired software is written this way.
It really amazes me how many companies (especially the ones with an avaricious reputation such as health insurance companies) don't take the payment system seriously.
They have invested heavily over the lifetime of the company in avoiding providing support. That reputation can never be revived.
Google does not have direct customer support in its DNA, it has the opposite, whatever that is.
They have not demonstrated relentless commitment to being available to resolve issues, and nothing matters more than this if you've bet your company on their platform.
If something goes really wrong. Amazon has your back and you'll find someone who'll listen who has the power to resolve it. Google, you're stuffed. If you've built you're business around that thing that went wrong, well time for regret.