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Comment by blinotz | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down.

Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform.

Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though.

Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.

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Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game.

Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet.

But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place.

Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics.

And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented.

Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact.

And that surely the complete opposite of customer service.

Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA.

And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.

I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly.

It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.

I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.

Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.

Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say.

Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job

Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.

Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

The difference between AWS and Gcloud is the ability to have a human conversation 1 click away. Shouldn't be that hard to replicate for Google.

I suspect a certain book retailer also didn't see the opportunuty in the first place.

Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account?

I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.

In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.

$50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done.

That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.

Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated.

One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).

> Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service.

No, I don't think there really is.

With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.

You failed to read his point. He is talking about their reputation, not whatever-happens-in-practice.

My point was that their reliance on reputation was misguided, especially in the case of a large conglomerate with many business units targeting consumers and businesses separately.

> I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.

AWS frequently will communicate detailed, specific technical workarounds and instructions via email on the free support plan. I’ve reached out to GCP support and the best I’ve ever received was a link to a generic support document.

AWS does give 1-1 support to smaller clients, and you can also pay extra to get actual phone help. The OP may or may not have had direct experience with this but his criticisms ring true with mine.

I'm an enterprise GCP customer, Google Support have a few superbly irritating habits: 1. They link to generic documentation that doesn't solve my problem 2. They insist that things that are clearly bugs aren't bugs until they're provided with some trivial reproduction case that satisfies them 3. They refuse to advise on issues with beta products despite half of GCP's products being in a beta 4. They are sometimes just flat-out wrong (but confidently so) about the cause of an issue

Give me AWS support any day

I'm an Enterprise AWS customer(well, I work for one), our account is special enough that we've got extra AWS tech people on site regularly in addition to normal support, and I've seen 1, 2, and 4 with AWS, both regular support and our on-top handholding.

On top of that AWS documentation is often both needlessly opaque, elliptical, incomplete, and outdated or otherwise incorrect.

On the other hand, if the issue isn't too obscure, AWS’s huge marketshare means that you can usually find decent answers on SO.

AWS has become hard to grasp in full scale.

I am currently in a support role at a company(not GCP) with some pretty big enterprise customers and let me just say that supporting software is fucking hard.

You essentially have to be a systems engineer/sysadmin for every one of your customers with only as much context as your customer is willing to share.

I like my job, but please have mercy on support.

You are 100% right, but it's worth noting that this is why there's a whole model of b2b interaction that involves embedded engineers partnering with a company to solve their specific problems (IBM, SAP, etc.).

The reason Google support has a hard time of it is Google doesn't offer that model to all its customers, just the ones that can pay a lot of money. But support still has the job of helping everyone else (with all the challenges you've described that such entails).

I think most of the annoyance with Google is their culturally not seeming to understand that model even exists.

Their zeitgeist appears to be "Other companies needed to provide that because their technology was wrong / incomplete. We'll just build things right instead."

Which is batshit insane, in the same way that expecting a veterinary pharmacist could prescribe for humans... with better technology.

To be fair I too probably wouldn't accept something as a bug until provided by a trivial reproduction case. I have seen too many developers call things bugs before looking at their own code.

It was a documentation/error response bug in their API, so it was hard to reproduce trivially. I gave them some source that reproduced it (https://github.com/samcgardner/neg-lb-initialiser), which really seems like it ought to be sufficient - it reliably reproduces wrong behaviour.

I do have experience as a GCP customer. I may not be a big customer of GCP, but I do spend around 3k/year in G Suite and 38k/year. It is uttermost impossible to have a phone conversation with somebody from GCP. You just can’t get a hold of somebody there.

Contrast that with AWS, where I had 4 engineers (back when our bill was 12k/year) helping us with recommending certain arquitectures and actively being useful anytime we reach out.

Our AWS expenses tripled because of growth and us choosing them for new components while our GCP expenses have remained flat.

Amounts like 30k/year may not sound big to many folks, but when you go to a truly good SaaS organization and spend that kind of cash, you get excellent support (online or offline). Google has absolutely amazing services that for the most part do not require human support, but for the times that you actually do, it is simply non-existant.

We're a new GCP customer with a growing amount of spend as we investigate multi-cloud (coming from AWS multi-account, words can't effectively express how much of a joy GCP is to work with).

It may be because we're an attractive customer with a very large amount of AWS spend, but the folks at GCP have made our adoption pretty amazing. We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services, in addition to onsite training/consultation with experts (all paid for by Google).

I've had to use support a couple of times and found it pretty on par with support I've gotten out of AWS.

Like any provider of services, I've found that relationships are key. Cultivating a good relationships with your reps/contacts goes a long way in their willingness to go the extra mile for you.

But, interactions with our reps have grown fewer (we're told their customer success/technical account management teams are understaffed), and it may be a sign that we're getting out of the honeymoon phase. We'll see.

> We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services

As have we. But that should ring a few alarm bells in regards to scalability and whether that can continue.

Google should just cut IBM's support org (the older, experienced folks) off the carcass, retrain them, and use them as a cadre for building their own org.

> Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure?

The point is that that doesn't matter. Even if it's not always logical, the reputation of your company as a whole sometimes matters, even in the case of corporate accounts ("nobody got fired for buying IBM" after all). Moreso in the case of startups where you have one tech guy who might have gotten burned before.

Amazon has a stellar reputation since nearly everyone has gotten a refund from Amazon for some cheap DOA $2 cable but meanwhile Google stonewalled them on some random glitch in Gmail. Even if it's not logical, those things stick around in people's heads.

I've had really high quality support from GCP and a nice human touch when I accidentally ran up a $10,000 TPU bill on my own personal project. I emailed them, saying I don't actually have that kind of money, and they not only wiped the whole bill, they refunded all the money which had been charged to my debit card and already removed from my bank account.

Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure.

To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.

I believe the "reputation" is simply the fact that you cannot call someone at Google for support unless you're an enterprise customer (GSUITE).

That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer.

...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams.

The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.

The problem is companies that treat support as a cost center.

A healthy company mines the hell out of it for feature discovery and product improvement.

These people are literally continually talking to your customers about what their actual pain points are!

The problem is that that data is incredibly hard to mine.

We pay for GSUIte for our org, approximately $300/month across a number of domains. I find the included chat support to be excellent and often marvel at how wait times are always under 1 minute. Perhaps other GSuite users dont know that chat support exists?

From what I've heard their customer service for paid customers seems to be fine. No first hand experience though because I've also heard that if anything goes wrong they tend to shut down and ban all your Google accounts - that seems to be the main thing people here seem to warn about anyway. And when that happens there's no way you're going to get to talk to anyone who can help you.

We recently had to choose a cloud provider for a Fortune 150 company. Google was the first one thrown out - for this exact reason. We have absolutely no faith or trust in Google's ability to keep anything running or to provide any level of customer service.

My experience with Azure match Google's reputation, and no, having an Enterprise Agreement with Azure doesn't help one bit, other than having an army of evangelists and partners chasing after you.

I completely disregard any documentation or information older than 2019, and I'm a bit suspicious if it is from the first half of the year, that is how often they change things for no apparent reason.

Their support will likely try to convince you to rewrite your app with their latest stack than solve obvious issues with Azure.

The only positive thing about the whole ecosystem is that support and evangelists/presales will likely admit bugs and share workarounds they've used. For example deploying AKS from the portal has a 50% chance of failing because it will not have created the service principle before something else requires it - so they will recommend creating the service principal in advance and selecting it in the config.

Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.

That's because new products get promotions.

Yeah - I get this but when things are free, I no longer assume they'll stick around and I no longer hold it against the business closing the free service down. I think in the mid 2000s a lot of people saw free as a quick way to do land grabs or experiments and google especially. As a result there is this mis-conception of trust. To me it was growing up with the internet and learning that a business needs $$ to operate so anyone selling something for free that didn't have a clear monetization strategy was to be avoided. Sure study it and learn but never trust it for your own well being... my two cents

Customer service doesn't scale, and it's sorking out OK for google so far.

My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.

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