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Comment by travisglines | Hacker News Reader

Glad this was posted.

I've used GCP in the past, including decisions on which cloud providers to use where we spent north of 1M USD/month.

Honestly Google's efforts are best focused on support issues like this and customer service rather than features to compete with AWS at the moment. A lot about GCP's setup is simpler and their network/hardware is well known to be better per dollar spent.

However, I've always found the ability to contact an AWS rep and work through a tough situation on billing/quotas to be much more convenient.

That often shifts the decision in Amazon's favor.

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Disclosure: I work on GCP.

To be clear, this person seems to have reached Support (I'll know more if they reach out to me) but is probably mid-way through the "Are you sure you didn't do this?" or something particular to debit cards.

Enterprises don't have the same experience, because you don't use a credit/debit card to pay for $1M/month in anything :). As an Enterprise, you also have dedicated folks in sales and professional services working with you, and so on.

I don't disagree that Support and customer empathy are huge factors of what goes into picking a provider. We need to improve, likely more than other providers. We all hate knowing that if you happen to know someone at Google, you get better help.

But, tl;dr: GCP Support != Google consumer "support" and individuals on credit/debit cards != Enterprises.

Hey boulos, upvoted your response. Thanks for taking action on this. Agreed that GCP != Google consumer support.

I didn't mean for my response to be perceived as negative for GCP, was only hoping to inspire those at GCP to continue to focus on the customer experience rather than features. AWS certainly needs the competition and I've also had great experiences using Google's cloud platform.

Message received! I just wanted to highlight that it's easy to extrapolate from individual accounts, but that can trick you. That doesn't make the current situation okay, and we get that.

You're correct--but most enterprises start out with credit card accounts when some line manager greenlights an experiment. "Time to go drop $50 million on a cloud provider this year" doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Experiences like this with early-stage accounts cause significant damage to the sales process--and you'll never see it coming until after the decision has been made.

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