Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded.

If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale:

- The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps.

- Manual spam detection in search results

- Customer Support for most adwords accounts

- Customer Support for Nexus devices

I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win.

I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.