I really hope someone for Google is listening ... I WANT you guys to be successful so that we have more competition in the market. But honestly, you just keep shooting yourselves in the feet.
If you treat Consumers like crap, then you must expect Enterprise customers to be concerned that you are going to do the same thing to them.
It's not like this is an isolated story either ... Google dropping the ban hammer on someone is a recurring theme and it makes me question whether I should be looking at alternatives.
Do you seriously believe this?
You understand people get locked out of the cloud accounts with Amazon and Microsoft all the time. And with Amazon and Microsoft they lose much more than access to their (free!) email account, they lose access to Kindle Books and Software Licenses that they've paid for with real money. That's a much bigger deal.
The moral of this story is that US citizens and businesses have zero recourse when they run afoul of web-based services. They have no real legal rights to their digital property. If the US had some kind of GDPR-like law that allowed customers an irrevocable right to their own data then this wouldn't be such a big deal. Indeed it might even spur some competition. But today you've got absolutely nothing. Today the onus is completely on each person to protect their own digital assets.
I know that even on a pretty small spend AWS had assigned us an account rep who would have moved heaven and earth if this had happened to us. I know Amazon retail has real humans in Ireland who will take my calls and take me seriously when I have problems.
I got an email recently from Google saying they were required to inform me they’d hired another gigantic Indian outsourcing company to do ... some kind of customer support work.
I can usually get even a very hairy ticket resolved on AWS in a manner of hours, every gcloud ticket we open takes days. Sure the respond in 24 hours but it's usually just a response that says "We'll get back to you eventually". If google actually wants to compete in cloud services they need to step up their game.
If I had to rate them, I'd say Microsoft has by far the best support, followed by Amazon, and Google's is (almost?) non-existent.
-your favorite google tech support (NONE!)
Baseless assumption.
>hired another gigantic Indian outsourcing company
How is this confidence inspiring?
Curious how you know that?
I've seen it happen as well to friends who have had previously stellar AWS reps that fall off the face of the earth when the ban hammer falls.
His was for "too many returns" when there was a huge scammer ring buying the type of items he was selling and returning bricks in the boxes. Took many weeks to get resolved, and the ban of course shut down everything including his personal accounts, AWS accounts, etc.
Amazon, Google, etc. seem to have decent "happy path" support - but if you fall into either an outlier or stuck into a "bad actor" group you may as well effectively not exist if you can't get traction on social media from the few cases of this I've seen.
I had an issue sending an email from my personal microsoft account and I submitted a case via the support tool and I had a response from a helpful representative within 12 hours.
It wasn't a pleasant experience but I did get to talk to real people and they did eventually resolve the issue.
Of course they did. All smart businesses would. Do you think they would also help you to move your mails out of Office 365, to a competitor maybe? That'd be noteworthy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amaz...
Freedom of speech is meaningless, when you have no voice.
Sure I know some will abuse returns policies, just as some buy an outfit in the high street, go out, and return it after the weekend. With the amount of defective by design, counterfeit and plain iffy product in Amazon's co-mingled marketplace inventory I expect there's been false positives just by being unlucky in product choices.
We have since ported to Firefox Quantum to be less reliant on Google.
https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...
It is also unnecessary. While I understand the convenience, there are plenty of better solutions to use over Google, especially for a software company.
When we first launched (on HN, I should note), we checked the browsers that people used to come to our site. It was roughly 90/10 Chrome/Firefox. That’s why we built our first extension for Chrome (and later built for Firefox also). Don’t we have to meet our users where they are?
Would love to hear your ideas!
Completely off topic but do you receive feedback from some users that your color gradients actually make it harder to read? I was struggling to read your landing page, my eyes kept were involuntarily flitting all over the page. My eyes kept jumping around scanning like they would at a traffic intersection or a pool (I was a lifeguard) for activity. It was kind of weird and stressful.
That seems to be how a lot of these stories (and stories like these aren't really uncommon on reddit or HN) of getting locked out of Google stuff are resolved.
If you don't know someone, you're hosed. How many times have people without inside contacts or reddit/HN accounts gone through this? We'll never know.
Same with a small company, as long as you have control of your domains and regular backups of the emails, having a fail-over isn't that hard. In this case the real damage is personal accounts, the business accounts could probably be up within a few hours at another provider (plus some more hours until backups are restored).
Bear in mind, if someone's all in with Google, they might have their domain controlled by Google Domains.
At one point I had my domain registered through my ISP, which was run rather eccentrically by a gentleman I eventually had a dispute with. He then (probably illegally) disabled all my DNS records, leaving me without my main email account for a week at a particularly vulnerable point in my life. It was horrific.
This should apply to all cloud services. If you use them for anything critical, total migration and DR should be part of your exit strategy for if anything like this happens. Everything you have in the cloud should be backed up in neutral formats off line on your property.
I’ve had a couple of run ins with google and personal accounts a few years back. Once my sign in was broken for two weeks. I couldn’t sign in with it showing a non descript error. I couldn’t find or get anyone to help. If this was anything business critical then it would have been pack up and go home.
Google apps support is notoriously crap as well. Been there, done that, left quickly.
One was co-located at one data center that had connectivity issues and they had all traffic automatically rerouted to their development stack in the office which operated as production while their colo sorted out issues.
I used it for a grepping through years of emails.
Any offline client will do; I use Claws Mail since ages where I migrated all my email also from past clients such as Eudora under Windows XP. http://www.claws-mail.org/
It's multiplatform, very fast and stable and can keep, index and search huge datasets of emails (mine is over 60K messages since mid 90s) in seconds. Backing up/exporting the email database needs only saving the Mail directory in the user's home; I've successfully moved mail directories between Linux and Windows installations of Claws Mail without a hitch. It made Outlook users drop their jaws when they realized how fast it is and they no longer needed to delete years of mails because the client became slow as molasses.
All you have to do is configure it to access Google servers like any other client then check the option to delete the mail on the server once it has been downloaded. IIRC this option is checked by default.
Also if you don't pay up, they might raid your office and take your computers.
https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti...
Their web app is very good. (Previously, I was using Gnus.) I also use iOS Mail to access fastmail via IMAP, because the VIP “folder” feature is great for cherrypicking.
No, really. even though free accounts ending. Actually not even sure if you can sign up at the moment. Has basically 'just worked' for years though, hopefully they stay in business. :/