Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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That Google doesn't provide support is a myth.

They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed.

And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error.

People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time.

Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.

Support people however are often powerless

I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.

That's what the company calls the team anyhow.

They can't call them "customer deflection team" :)

AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.

If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team.

To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.

I am not sure I care about the hierarchy of the company I am working with. If I do have an issue that can not be resolved with a standard “look up in the issue database” method - I need to be switched to someone with the necessary skills to fix that for me.

That is mostly not the case with Google as it usually ends up in a situation where I am meeting a group of their lawyers instead.

"Comfort people"? "Though luck people"?

They provided me horrible support on Gsuite. It took nearly 2 months of badgering them to get them to fix an error on their end with setting up DKIM.

They refused to extend my trial at all while we were getting it sorted out.

I left Gsuite and immediately received much better support from Office 365. I left them for other reasons. I also get good support from Zoho and Fastmail.

Google has been the worst by far.

> That Google doesn't provide support is a myth.

Try getting support for anything that's not G Suite or Project Fi (which have arguably good customer support). Sometimes the "support" is just a link to the forums.

I interacted with their German hardware support twice and the experience was great.

I'm no expert, but maybe it's the free-to-use products that lack support.

Nitpick: Can we please stop saying "free-to-use" and instead say, for example, "paid-with-data"?

Nope.

Or "spyware"? The fact that it historically meant something else doesn’t make it less fitting in my opinion.

But that implies you don't (also) pay with data if you pay for the service, which is often not true

"Paid with data" sounds nominally accurate but misleading.

Suppose there were a paid mail service, and another free one with a billion users, and the paid service's spam filtering relied on the free one for accuracy. (Spammers can't very well spam a hundred thousand people without hitting at least a few thousand of the billion.) Would you say that the users of the free one pay with data? They do, but to me, the phrase "paid with data" suggests other data than just the spam you get and whether you click "this is spam" on a particular message.

It's not always true. Many things (often smaller things) are free to use and not paid with data.

There is Google One for all Google products. I used it and it was quite good.

>They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite.

Of course. With G Suite, you are the customer.

On YouTube, you are not the customer. You are the product, whether you're a viewer or a creator. Advertisers are the customer.

You are not a 'product' you are a vendor and companies have to maintain good relationships with their vendors or they will lose them.

Curious of the ramifications of the fact that companies normally only have a handful of vendors relative to their employee size, but have tons and tons of "vendor" end-users.

It depends on the kind of business you're in. I work for a sales driven MSP and we have a ton of actually vendors in the normal sense of the word. We probably have more vendors than we have employees but I haven't counted. We spend less time maintaining out relationships with them than we do our customers but that's more because half of them are big impersonal companies like MS which don't require a lot of effort, just a little bureaucracy.

I think that Youtube is in a different situation in that their creators are mostly individuals who use Youtube because it affords them advantages that they can't get elsewhere. If that were to change, either with Youtube becoming less popular or another platform becoming good enough, Youtube would lose a lot of its video makers and that would lose them a lot of business. I don't think Youtube's problem is that they see creators as products so much as that in order to maintain their market position, they have to be all things to all people and they desperately want to automate their business. That means there's not going to be any policy that works for everyone that uses Youtube and no matter what they do, somebody is going to get screwed.

Not when you do not monitize your channel. At that point, you're not even a product.

In that case you're a loss-leader.

Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.

If something bad happens on their side and it does happens eventually, they must fix the problem by manually editing the system. If they don't allocate human resource for that task or their system is hard to edit by hand, they don't provide the support.

> Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.

If 90% of you customers are phoning to complain the service is down and they can't reboot the modem because the lights are turned off because of the power cut, you can't have skilled support engineers dealing with them. Setting aside the money, the engineers would just go stir crazy and turn into BOFHs.

The trick is to either vet your customers, or enable a shibboleet protocol

Please restart your computer.

How do you propose filtering out the tech savvy vs. unsavvy folks needing support? I think a big problem with "tiered support" (shudder) is that the support folks on the 1st level are often less tech savvy than the people who actually need something fixed... but they deal with so many customers who don't actually have an issue to report that it makes it worthwhile.

Oh, the restart fixed youtube.com for you? Great! Have a wonderful day.

You think Microsoft has bad support, try raising a ticket with Citrix. You will regret ever being born.

Really? Have you ever tried to use the G Suite admin console?

I'm not at all surprised that Youtube support is so rubbish though. The interesting thing is, if they had better support they wouldn't be in such a disastrous position now.

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