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Comment by dataminded | Hacker News Reader

Great opportunity to be a consultative partner to your client and get them out of GCP.

At a minimum get a paid support plan and leverage that. Show them what support will look like before they are too far in to move.

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Yep, I don't exactly love AWS either but at least it generally works in a sane and predictable manner.

Google Cloud probably does too, even in this case. Or I'd put my money that way rather than on the client. The fact that you are thinking of trying to set up a new account despite the possible consequences to your business, is a tell of who you are working for.

There is no consequence to my business. Are you drunk or high right now? Because you're coming across as weirdly paranoid and reading way too much into the situation.

My beard is gray. I tend to apply Occam’s razor. The problem with code is almost never a bug in the compiler.

The simplest explanation for your experience is not Google being incompetent.

I have read AskHN’s written a bit later under similar facts. The consultant is trying to get their own account reinstated because they made a new account on behalf of a client experiencing “arbitrary” mistreatment.

Outside of that, the market for consulting clients is a market for lemons. Good clients already have consultants. Those consultants hang onto good clients like grim death.

I could be misreading what you wrote. You might not have written down something that would change my take.

Maybe this is not a situation where you pay the dumb tax. But everyone pays it sometimes.

As for paranoia: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challen...

So yes, you're high? You are making so many weird assumptions and jumping to strange conclusions here. Or you're a Google shill, I honestly can't tell which.

I am not using much of my imagination to guess how your interactions with Google customer support went. These days companies have access to a customer rating services. And you experienced 404, number not in service, and connection to the Philippines where there are call centers for hire dedicated to “the most demanding” customers.

Hopefully you are billing time and materials.

I've worked closely with two of the clouds (GCP and AWS) and the one thing you need to appreciate is that with GCP, moreso than AWS, if you want to go from training wheels to basic car, you need to make contact with a human and establish a relationship, ideally by phone or video chat. This is doubly true if you're in EU where GCP has traditionally had a hard time billing small customers due to VAT issues.

I'm not defending GCP here (personally I think this is another sign Google doesn't actually take cloud seriously as a business as Microsoft or Amazon do) but, the reality is that many of these things unfortunately do require high-touch human interfacing to get started and to expand. I'm more a "take my credit card and shut up" person...

Google takes the cloud seriously. But at the scale of Google and with its history in regard to ordinary users, it is not really culturally structured to provide small scale B2B or retail B2C customer service for anything it offers.

In contrast Amazon has a B2C culture and Microsoft a B2B one. Amazon has scaled its up to B2B and Microsoft’s success has been in large part from providing a B2B approach to B2C customers.

Google default is users are product. Customers are people signing multi year contracts for millions per year.

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