Yay! Unicode! Encoding! Fun!
No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards.
I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market.
I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fee on the the apps account. Then one day I found that the wrong card had been charged for the apps renewal. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at google. I couldn't find any help online. I couldn't even find a phone number to call.
So I removed the cards from my wallet account. Cancelled the wallet account, and snarl "no" anytime google tries to get a credit card from me.
It works, it's easy enough, and I'm not sure I want it to be any easier.
However, 90% have access to a cell phone.
That was the basis for my failed micropayments project :)
It didn't fail because of a lack of demand, but because it's hard to tackle without significant resources. I still might resurrect a less ambitious version (being a middleman here in Uruguay).
I tend to always use Paypal or Google Checkout (sorry... 'Wallet'...) if given the option as I don't have to fish out my card and go through several screens of slow badly implemented web forms. Often I don't even have to enter my address whilst with a credit/debit card option I always do.
I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook.
but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.
> pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email.
I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about Maps? Saying that maps is search because it has search built in means we can call GMail search too. What about Calendar?
> I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple
This is where the snark starts to bother me. Let's acknowledge that Apple made a phone with a big glass touchscreen before Google. What, since then, has been a great innovation that Android has rushed to rip off?
And what about the ads? They were probably the first company that started making real money with them online.
Google Maps? When I want to find a place I use it, are there any other products that provide a good coverage of almost the whole world (and my little village)?
AdSense? Youtube?
Also, Google Reader is the leader in its (admittedly small) space. And I'm pretty sure so is Google News. Oh, and Google Maps.
