Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen other companies walk away from Google Cloud for similar reasons. Automate everything to scale doesn’t work for the Fortune 500. They should absolutely own this market.

View on HN

This is why AWS and Azure continue to gain market share in cloud, while Google remains relativity stagnant, despite (in many cases) superior technology.

Their sales staff is arrogant and has no idea how to sell into F500 type companies.

Source: 10+ meetings, with different clients, I attended where the Google sales pitch was basically "we are smarter than you, and you will succumb". The Borg approach. Someone needs to revamp the G sales and support approach if they want to grow in the cloud space.

Yes, this is our experience as well, and the root cause of their many problems with GCP. Tech is nice but matters little if the account team just ignores us.

I have less experience with their sales/account managers but every time I got a super weird patronizing and even cultish vibe that really put me off.

Yes that's exactly what I'm talking about they are super arrogant and unwilling to discuss things at a practical level.

And I've seen it cause them to lose at least 10 potentially good sales.

They have advantages but they're so arrogant that it puts people off.

It's more than 10 times or more people told me they prefer Google's solution to Microsoft or Amazon's but they're going with a competitor because they can't stand Google's arrogant attitude. It's close to laughable because of throwing money away just because they won't back off.

Even for small businesses their sales is pretty bad. I once got a package in the mail from them with a URL containing a tracking code printed on it to contact them that was so obviously Google being Google and treating people as part of a funnel. There was no phone number to be found and nothing personalized.

The other funny thing is the package had a neoprene sleeve for a Chromebook. Eventually a sales person reached out via email assuming I owned a Chromebook and acted like I owed them a phone call because they gave me a neoprene sleeve I couldn’t use.

The entire package ended up going in the trash, which was an unfortunate waste of unrecyclable materials.

If you filled in a form at the link provided from one of the bits of paper in the box they would have sent you a Chromebook for the sleeve. I'e got one here gathering dust. My boss threw away the same package but I was curious and looked through it carefully.

Sounds like it functions as some kind of filter, whether intentional or not. ;)

"People who will look through every bit of advertising crap company x sends", vs those who don't.

Something, somewhere is probably making stats on that. ;)

I found it interesting that you wrote "Something, somewhere", and not "Someone, somewhere"

Yeah, that was on purpose. It's no longer obviously just humans potentially doing this. ;)

> "we are smarter than you, and you will succumb". The Borg approach.

Well, that seems to be the approach at Google. Starting with hiring

Not surprising they end up with a hivemind that can't see past their mistakes.

That's interesting. I was of the understanding that everything at Google office tries to de-stress you/undistract you. I thought that would result in people being calmer/ more empathetic.

Arrogance is arrogance, whether stressed or not. Hiring arrogant people tends to create an environment non-conducive to empathy.

Reminds me of a thread I saw on the Google Inbox mobile app a while back. Brilliant app, but no 'unread message counter'. There was a huge number of people on the thread begging for that feature and going so far as to say that it was the one thing that prevented them from using the app. Their thinking was apparently that you should have filters for everything and it all should've fallen neatly into little boxes, but for people that have been using email 10 times longer than those developers have been out of college, that's not very practical. One G dev chimed in and said 'But that's now how I use email' and closed off the discussion.

Was that this thread?

https://support.google.com/inbox/forum/AAAAg4HSpy4qi4kQLXV6w...

Absolutely.

It blows my mind that GCloud, with arguably superior tech and performance compared to AWS/Azure, can't handle support. I have my own horror stories from 2 years ago, but still they haven't fixed it.

Google just doesn't seem to be able to focus on products that requires service and customer support. Maybe they just don't care about it while they have an infinite revenue stream from search and advertising. Whatever it is, they should be humiliated.

I love the tech, and the ux details like in browser SSH (AWS hasn't improved UX EVER) but they can't get support right? Amazing.

AWS has acquired Cloud9 for in browser for desktop environment/ SSH, it inherits account credentials. You should check it out.

Yeah, Cloud9 is billed as an IDE, but it's really more useful as a terminal inside your cloud environment that happens to have a text editor. Workspaces has been great for a cloud-based development environment, and the new Linux Workspaces will be more useful than the Web-based "cloud IDEs".

I haven't tried workspaces. Will I get better performance from my chromebook than just using cloud9? Cloud9 is also incredibly cheap.

They are very different things: Workspaces runs a full desktop environment (Windows or Linux) on an EC2 instance, and enables you to remotely access it through client software. The client software uses Teradici PCoIP, rather than VNC or RDP, and Teradici is amazing: it is so fast that the desktop feels like it is running on your local computer.

This means that you can run whatever development tools that you want on the EC2 instance, rather than the very limited code editor that Cloud9 provides. You can easily run a full copy of Visual Studio on a Workspace, and get the full resources of an EC2 instance with SSD drivess.

> Google just doesn't seem to be able to focus on products that requires service and customer support

That's literally any product that people pay for (instead of viewing ads).

Customer support isn't and never has been in their DNA. It's often rage-inducing how hard it is to contact a human at Google.

They seem to think they can engineer products that don't need humans behind them.

That's the meme, but my experience with the business support for G Suite does match it at all: I can easily call the phone support, get a competent human quickly, and they are very helpful.

I think I read recently that they outsourced g suite support

Ironically, they let you know every time they can that you can contact your personal adwords sales person by phone.

The reason for this is obvious, but it's a good point. It's like someone whose personality becomes awful right after you marry them.

I'm actually going to take this back to my company as a principle: "Treat locked-in/subscribing customers as well as our salespeople treat prospects."

In my limited experience, Google has worse support than facebook (when it comes to advertising agencies). They simply don't care because you are a tiny multimillion euros company and they are THE GOOGLE.

I didn't write that article, but last week I came to the same conclusion and began my migration from GCP to AWS. I admire Google's tech but Cloud Platform lacks fit and finish. It's not fully productized. It's not even fully documented. (Is it indolence or arrogance to publish a link to the source code as the only explanation of an important API?) I'm sorry, Google, you ignored me when I was crushing on you. Now I have Amazon.

I think they still are mainly focused on their ad business as the core of the company and cloud is something they 'do on the side'. For Microsoft, Azure is core business, it's the future of the company. If they fuck it up, they're dead. Google apparently doesn't see their cloud offering as their core business and therefore doesn't get the attention it needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com