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Comment by dilandau | Hacker News Reader

>We hear you and are eagerly looking to improve things.

Joking aside, isn't this just what people should come to expect from the company that has always tried to normalize the "no support and no service" model?

If these antics start causing GOOG to lose share in the browser market then they may review these policies, but I highly doubt it. At the end of the day GOOG is an ad company and publicly-traded at that. They have a bottom-line and a lot of shareholders watching it.

Support channels/forums are probably not the way to go, in other words. Stop using their browser, stop using their search. That's probably the only way they will be incentivized to change.

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> "no support and no service" model?

this is one of the reasons why Google cloud will lose to AWS in the long run.

AWS is customer obsessed, Google is not.

At Amazon the most important person is the customer. At Google the most important person is the Google engineer. I firmly believe that's why they suck at selling enterprise products.

I’ve emailed and sent Linkedin msgs to 3 people who work at gcp for cloud credits. They didn’t care. AWS gave us credits + support in less than 3 days. I wish Google best of luck with their 5yr strategy. Hope their enterprise game is better than their startup one.

... so you're upset that you didn't get a service for free?

If you're serious about spending a lot on the cloud it's reasonable to expect a taste. Just like an ice cream store.

the free tier is for that, isn't it ?

You don't get much in terms of performance and capacity in the free tier preventing you from testing anything beyond the tiniest workloads.

If you need to pre-arrange expenses with the finance department, it's much faster to test drive with credits.

ah, i see. in that case i think it's okay that you should pay.

its not like ice cream.

if you messaged random people it's quite reasonable that they didn't bother answering you. i wouldn't have done it either.

you should get in contact with sales people via the proper channels and arrange testing (whether paid or not) with them.

If you message random "people that work at gcp" then "not caring" is probably one of the most polite things they could do.

It's so difficult to imagine a) getting ahold of someone at Google who can actually help you, and b) having some sense of assurance that they will actually help you.

"Google deleted my X" posts always rise to the top on HN because they elicit a strong emotional response from developers. I think it's worthwhile to reflect on why that happens. For me, it's because I absolutely despise seeing an algorithm have control over an individual's livelihood. This may be part of the Google mythos? Or it may simply be that they make their real money selling ads, and allocate support resources accordingly.

> This may be part of the Google mythos?

They officially dropped the "don't be evil" motto some time ago, so yes.

> they make their real money selling ads, and allocate support resources accordingly

Of course. Every company allocates support resources the same way: to their paying customers.

YouTube content creators can relate too. Lots of videos about YouTubers getting randomly demonetized or removed from search results for no reason.

I can confirm that the support on for example displayvideo360 (one of google ad products) is absolutely stellar even for very low revenue players. Meaning live chat with well trained support persons, and quick escalation if needed. Resolution rate : 100% within a couple day in our case.

I don't understand how people work for these companies as developers and implement these policies and systems and aren't just as angry about it and don't stand up to their supervisors over it: if frankly makes me have a really low opinion of people who work for Google, Apple, etc. :/.

They get a few hundred thousand dollars a year to do it. If you're working for a global surveillance ad tech company, you're obviously not there for the good things they do, you want the money. And they give them the money.

The interview process is made intentionally annoying so people self-select towards only obeying marionettes actually applying for the job.

As result, you get a whole company of yes-men who have no spine.

I definitely agree. Microsoft Azure also, I feel customers have a very big part in the direction. (And right from day 1, long before azure, Microsoft focused on having “partner networks” which meant that although you weren’t dealing with Bill Gates directly you were part of a chain of motivated people all the way through to Bill.) Google’s way is not gonna last.

> Stop using their browser, stop using their search.

The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think).

They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _good_.

What should I use for search? I tried switching to DDG for a month but I kept finding myself manually typing in Google.com to make the more obscure searches.

That is my exact habit now - DDG for the easy/lazy stuff, google for more obscure. I'm still giving them some search info to profile me, but hopefully it's skewed enough that it's value is lower. And I'm definitely giving them less ad views.

I actually prefer DDG in a few fronts, like configuration of language and region.

Well, quit typing google.com, for one. Use DDG’s !g feature. Or !sp, which is like Google results without the Google frontend.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Couldn't find !sp. What is it?

StartPage

If you have all the adblockers and stuff, and open a fresh private browser, nothing wrong with taking advantage of Google's still-superior search for finding things.

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