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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor.

In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.

I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.

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Most of those Google support stories aren't about GCP, though. It's things like app support, or Gmail support, etc.

People, me included, just remember Google doesn't support their products. I won't be arsed to consult a list of Google products and properties to see if this particular one is going to get support or not.

If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhere.

I don’t buy this claim that Microsoft has good support for all their products. If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me? Why do my family members keep asking me for help with their computers if Microsoft support is so great?

To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.

> If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me?

Microsoft does offer paid support for Windows.

Because there aren’t a lot of stories of businesses struggling to contact Microsoft over a product they’ve paid for. Yet every other month there’s an article on the front page of HN of some paying business struggling to reach Google and the only way to do it is to go viral on social media.

The upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 had similar consequences, but this could also be a reflection of the different types of audience the two companies serve.

For example, the person who wrote this book is probably never going to post a complaint on social media:

https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Against-Windows-10-Microsoft-...

Figuring out whether a vendor will care about their customers in a given situation has a very simple, very universal "worst-case rule": if you're paying the vendor, and your "account" (in the financial sense) is typewise-indistinguishable from other accounts, of customers who pay the vendor ridiculously-huge amounts of money, then there will be a good support process for you.

Why? Because big-spender enterprise customers demand that vendors implement hand-holding red-carpet VIP support for them; and most of that work is, surprisingly enough, a capital cost, not an operational expense; and so you can free-ride on it as long as it's been set up.

On the other hand, if there is any way to typewise-differentiate you from the big-spender customers, then you'd better believe that they'll have support channels you don't have.

Well, maybe they should've called it "Alphabet Prism" or something and not "Google Cloud" so that it is set apart from their other product support in consumer's minds.

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