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Comment by abrookewood | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly right. Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it.

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.

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Just a reminder that a guy was locked out of his Amazon services, plus $140,000 of cash and inventory from his shipping business, because he changed the name of the profile on his Kindle Fire to "baba". He was stuck in autoreply hell and wasn't able to get resolution until he made a huge stink on social media as is happening here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amaz...

This makes me wonder if there should be laws enshrining corporate responsibility and perhaps a mandatory appeals process.

"But companies are people too, and they should be able to decide whom to do business with at a whim!"

Freedom of speech is meaningless, when you have no voice.

> Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it.

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.

> Do you seriously believe this?

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 know Amazon retail has real humans in Ireland who will take my calls and take me seriously when I have problems.

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.

Google and Amazon use mostly the exact same outsourcing companies for their 1st and 2nd level support.

If this is true AWS either demands more or pays them more because AWS high tier support vs GCloud "platinum" support is a joke.

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.

There's a regional Amazon support hub (for South America) a few floors down from where I'm sitting. Microsoft has stellar support in this region (I even interviewed once). As far as I know, Google has no equivalent.

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.

Greetings google user. Were sorry that you're having problems at this time. Please check into the forums and go get support from other sorry sods who also need help. Maybe if you can run enough brain cells together, you might be able to solve an issue.

-your favorite google tech support (NONE!)

AWS support is not outsourced but knowledgable US people who can and do page anyone including the engineers for help. There is a reason the top level of support costs an extra 3-10% of spending.

>who would have moved heaven and earth if this had happened to us

Baseless assumption.

>hired another gigantic Indian outsourcing company

How is this confidence inspiring?

I am guessing the giantic Indian outsourcing company is filled with AIs, they probably couldn't afford "real humans"

I absolutely do believe this, I have people from Microsoft reaching out to me constantly regarding our Azure account here. If there was abuse on it or something of that sort, I would not only get an email, I would get a phone call. We don't even spend that much. We don't pay for their upper tier support plans either. At my last job, Microsoft worked very actively to help the corporation (much larger than my current job) move over thousands of emails over to Office 365.

> Microsoft worked very actively to help the corporation (much larger than my current job) move over thousands of emails over to Office 365.

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.

I'm curious - how are time-sensitive and potentially irreplaceable emails and documents upon which your company's existence or your job may depend, less important than a collection of software licenses that, while expensive, are re-purchasable and not going away anytime soon?

I should have been more specific - I was mainly thinking about AWS or Azure.

I believe for all of Microsoft's business services, you can submit a real ticket to real support people. Completely possible with my organization. It better be too, given that we pay them maybe $15,000/year for Office 365 licenses.

My experience is that this is true for my company's corporate Azure/Office365 type services and ALSO for my personal Office365 Home subscription.

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.

Microsoft offers free phone support on free services. I had an issue with parental settings in Microsoft Accounts and Xbox Live. I was able to chat with a person online, receive call backs from 2 different people, spent hours on the phone, and a received a up email many months later from Microsoft notifying me that the issue had been resolved.

It wasn't a pleasant experience but I did get to talk to real people and they did eventually resolve the issue.

The same Amazon who have had publicity for shutting down your entire account, along with associated services, if you have the "wrong" profile of returns?

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.

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