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Comment by 1_2__3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to sound disrespectful, and very much appreciate your posting. But realize that the audience here has seen the OP's story play out with Google's products over and over again. This is clearly a systemic issue with how Google handles support, and claiming "fell short this time" is more than a little disingenuous.

(I also get 'man bites dog' will also get more traction than the inverse, but regardless - this kind of complaint is a very common one about Google's products, from consumers and businesses alike).

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FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general. My interactions with Cloud Support on the other side of the fence has led me to believe they are very committed and working very hard. Yes, you have to pay for it. But once you do, regardless of the tier of support, I've seen them work tirelessly and escalate tickets to engineering quickly (order hours, not days) if they couldn't figure it out.

I'm looking at the postmortem now and without wishing to jump the gun and talk about things I can't, it looks like this is being taken very seriously and a number of improvements and bug fixes are going to result. In this instance, I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous".

Disclaimer: Used to work on Google Cloud, now on Google Open Source Programs Office.

> FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general

> I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous"

The problem is that to us from the outside, they do look the same.

In fact, that email in the article, and the subsequent events, are in exactly the same style as the "ban hammer" Play Store publishers get. You really can't blame us (Google's actual paying customers) from equating one with the other.

I'm not entirely convinced that people who have a bad experience with Windows support would then assume Azure support was poor, similarly with Amazon and AWS... Why should Google [Product Area X] and Google Cloud be any different?

Windows and Amazon are consumer facing products. Azure, AWS, Play Store publishing and Google Cloud are all developer facing products.

(And no, I do not equate consumer Windows support with enterprise Windows support either, and as it turns out they are not the same level.)

Nobody cares how hard you or your coworkers work. Results matter, nothing else.

Given the story so far, you offer adwords style customer service (we don't give a damn about you) while attempting to catch up from position 3 behind aws and azure in the paas race. Complete with automated emails with outdated documentation and no human anywhere without a social media outcry. I'm sure stories like this are damaging (seriously, just use aws), and there will be some postmortem damage control, but unless I see a human support sla for situations like this, I can't see why anyone would risk their business on you.

Seriously, a fix it or we shut you down email for reasons you won't share with an 2 business day response. Of course, you're issuing a 3 day warning, so if that fell on a Friday, you would be dark before anyone bothered to look at the support ticket (3 days expire Monday, 2 biz days Tuesday evening). Amazing.

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