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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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."

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.

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.

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.

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