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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture

Simply because Google has never considered its users "customers" in the first place

There is only one customer at Google, and it is the people buying ads.

Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.

So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.

I have lots of criticisms of Google, but let's not spread misinformation. GCP does offer paid support options, depending on your business requirements. If it's critical for your business then you can afford to pay a few extra hundred dollars a month

They have it but it’s significantly worse than aws even at the enterprise tier. I don’t feel like I’m treated like a customer, just someone who should feel blessed to be allowed to use their systems. We’ve come across bugs that broke our entire system that they were paged about weeks prior but “nobody important was affected”

Nah, it's absolutely cultural, not about the money paid. Large accounts may make them more responsive quantitatively, but the qualitative lack of care is still there. Google is the opposite of Amazon, cares about its engineers, does not care about its customers. They operate on the model of letting a well engineered product (as determined by Google engineers alone) capture users, and this you can see through and through in the difference between GCP and AWS.

It has worked so far, but as soon as the day their technical quality starts to flag, they are probably as good as dead.

GCP support is not really good. If you need somebody to repeat support notes - they yes. Otherwise, it your business is down they will not help you with reasonable troubleshooting options or anything in that sort. I'm sorry but it is just not good.

In my experience, their lower, "extra hundred dollars a month" range support plan was a waste of time, patience and money. They didn't seem to have any means to help me.

After using the big three clouds for a long time, GoogleCloud got the absolutely worst support. And by far.

Sure we pay for their support. In fact, we pay them quite alot of money, but this "support" is horrible frustrating nonsense of dealing with email after email with clueless reps. When we complained about this basically we were told we need a TAM to avoid this.

Or they're just plain incompetent. That's always an option too.

My story: I bought the first google tablet. One of the incentives for ordering early was a credit in the google store. I used it to buy books. It turns out that when you depleted the credit enough and wanted to buy something that cost more than the remaining credit, you couldn't apply the credit and pay the rest with your card.

In my case, I had like $11 left on the credit, wanted a $14 book, and couldn't pay the final $3 with my card. For reals.

Some product manager looked at this complete fucking dumpster fire and said ship it. If you can't get the simple things right, like fully spending down a credit, you're not gonna get much right at all.

I hate to sound like a jerk saying this but it feel like it is arrogance. It seethes in every product, communication, page, document, their approach to every new market. There is no choice, you do it their way.

You're not by far the first to say this. It's the technocratic equivalent of a benevolent dictatorship. The dictator is doing you a favor and you'd better follow for your own good. And maybe they are right for now, but the whole setup was never meant to be an equal relationship between Google engineers at the top and everyone else at their feet.

I understand the gripe about multiple payment options in Amazon.

I usually end up with a gift card from some promo and it always seems to end up with $3.XX left on it. I want to use it up, but hardly anyone supports multiple card payments. Including Amazon.

What they do support, though, is buying a Amazon gift card of custom value, and making multiple payments with that.

https://jillcataldo.com/use_old_visa_gift_cards_on_amazon

Every time I try to convert a prepaid card to a gift card on Amazon it gets declined because of the temporary $1 test charge they do when added as a payment method. Then I have to wait a few days for it to drop off and try again. If I wait too many days (?), they will run the test charge again and I'm back to where I was on day one.

I'm sure there is a "right" way to do it but I've never been able to make it work as I want on the first try.

That sucks! I use the "EGift" option, but I select the "reload your balance" (https://www.amazon.com/asv/reload/order?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=...) item/link and was able to do it two days ago with a $50 prepaid. No odd authorizations or anything, had the amount on my Amazon balance within 2 or 3 minutes.

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