Following a debacle at Amazon, I can't help but wonder where customer support at tech companies has gone.

Recently, Amazon inexplicably erased the e-books from a Norweigan woman's Kindle and terminated her accountmind you, an account that makes Amazon money. To make matters worse, some twerp in customer service sent her an idiotic email response. The brouhaha is detailed on her friend's blog.

But this stunt wasn't about the onerous licensing agreements or the concept that you never really own your e-books. These are issues that will eventually come to a head in some court of law where we have to hope that common sense prevails. This issue is actually about personnel policies and the skinflint nature of far too many hugely profitable companies in the tech sector that put very little effort into customer service.

If you have some customer service issue with Google, what do you do? You certainly don't call Google's customer service line. If you have a problem with Yahoo Finance, who do you call? Nobody.

The other day, someone was complaining to me that the new Microsoft stores are nice but Microsoft's Guru Barits spinoff of the Genius Baris particularly useless. These supposed gurus cannot help anyone with anything running on Windows that does not come from Microsoft.

Microsoft used to have customer service specialists who worked with the media to make sure that the Windows OS was always running smoothly. The company ended up firing them for reasons that made no sense.

This is a trend. It's a shame that a company like Microsoft, which is valued at $256 billion and pocketed $56 billion in profits, cannot somehow afford to keep these essential customer support people employed. Most other big tech companies are the same way. Amazon made $10 billion in profits last year. One billion dollars could hire 10,000 customer support people at a generous $100,000 per year and leave $9 billion for yachts and cars. The last great customer-centric company that was in business was WordPerfect.

Mobile phone companies especially outsource support personnel to India or the Philippines and the representatives do little more than read from a script. "First let me ask. Is the computer plugged in?" they might say.

This Amazon fiasco was an embarrassment to the company and will have future repercussions, but it all goes back to this support issue. The person who was servicing the poor outlawed woman was ill-trained. It's not entirely his fault, though. The representatives generally cannot actually do much more than send out canned responses.

Remember, where there is smoke there is fire, and you can be certain that this sort of support fiasco will happen again and again and eventually hurt the bottom line.

When we switched over from manufacturing-based economy to the predicted "service economy," you'd think that service would actually show up. Well, it hasn't.