Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835
Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835
Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems.
I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_.
If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...
I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
Sounds great!
We're running production systems making a significant amount of of our revenue, and when, not if, shit hits the fan we need someone with intimate knowledge of the internals to give us undivided attention until it's resolved.
Sometimes it's because we fucked up, sometimes it's the perfect storm of internals working unexpected - all of the time our systems are not working and our customers depend on them for their daily work.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o...
Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out.
Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.
That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.
It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).
I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.
Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing?
I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it.
HN is no longer niche.
> Who has the budget for this?
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens.
Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
Every enterprise, basically.
You subscribe to social media monitoring as a service, they monitor the fire hose and flip on the bat signal as needed.
It’s dirt cheap, relative to not knowing what’s said about you.
Ummm, Google(/Alphabet)?
You might have heard of them? Fourth biggest company (by market cap) on the planet? They have budget to do all this shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
Pretty sure they wouldn't even notice the costs of downvoting every single negative comment about them on every single website they're already crawling and mining for keywords and sentiment...
The claim of a covert army of astrotufers / reputation management firms was silly when it was made back in the day on Slashdot and it's still silly today. If nothing else, it would never pay well enough for people to keep such a juicy secret.
Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years).
Great customer service :-/