Google Cloud offers a model for fixing Google’s product-killing reputation | Hacker News Reader

Google Cloud offers a model for fixing Google’s product-killing reputation

arstechnica.com

35 pointstheshrike7926 comments

Google disabled my wife's voice number and business account for several weeks, right after she ordered new business cards, signs, and started a marketing campaign. They continued to charge her for Google ads each week.

Her accounts were re-enabled about 7 - 8 weeks later. No explanation given.

She averages 2 - 5 new customers per week, gained largely through referrals and her marketing campaigns, so Google's actions had a significant impact on her business.

My wife cancelled her accounts with Google after transferring her voice number. I've also moved off of GCP for my side businesses, and several people within our network have done the same after hearing about our situation. I've even stopped using their search engine, and am moving away from gmail.

I advise anyone considering Google's products to look elsewhere.

For a certain size of customer this problem does go away, and I think this commitment from GCP is an attempt to confirm that.

As a counterpoint, we've had no issues with GCP and have found it to be a better product than the alternatives for what we want. We have an account manager, have received lots of support from Google in setting up, have been able to trial products in closed alpha before release, and haven't been hit by any meaningful deprecations. We also have a contract with SLAs that do not let Google arbitrarily cut us off. Obviously they still could, but at least it would be in explicit violation of a contract.

Also something that is rarely cited as a plus point: we are not a Google competitor, and one of our major partners considered it a significant benefit of using us that we did not host on Amazon services. There are an increasing number of businesses who may see some value in not hosting on AWS.

At the risk of sounding obtuse, what would be the downsides of hosting on Amazon?

Many companies see Amazon as a competitor and don't want to give them money.

I use to work for a large health insurance company and much of the executive/leadership teams would openly disparage Amazon in meetings. Amazon doesn't even sell health insurance (not yet at least) and they were overly hostile due to PillPack alone.

It was one of the reasons why that company chose GCP over AWS. I imagine this scenario isn't uncommon.

I guess that would make an even stronger argument to use Azure, right?

Maybe for people who have never had the misfortune of using a MS product.

It boils down to 2 factors:

- Giving money to a competitor (even if the product you're paying for isn't competition). This can be hard to justify to e.g. shareholders as being financially responsible.

- Potentially giving away trade secrets to Amazon, either in patterns of usage of AWS, or in actual data that AWS stores.

I would hope the latter is an unnecessary worry, but we've seen them clone retail products from others again and again based on best-selling or high margin products, so why not use intelligence from AWS? I assume it happens at some limited level.

Amazon treats their work staff poorly (at least on the Amazon.com side, if not AWS), and Bezos isn't a very nice human. They throw a lot of their weight around and bully small local governments into succumbing to their conquests. They are a largely unethical company, IMO, and supporting them risks further eroding small business and democratic checks and balances everywhere.

> They throw a lot of their weight around and bully small local governments into succumbing to their conquests. They are a largely unethical company, IMO, and supporting them risks further eroding small business and democratic checks and balances everywhere.

If you strip out the first sentence, and leave the rest... I think you've just ruled out every large corporation, and especially all of the tech megacorps.

Yeah, you're totally right. With cloud (or other) vendors, it's often a "lesser of many evils" kinda thing. Amazon is just particularly and notoriously bad.

edit: typo, changed $700,000 to $70,000. Also note that isn't income, but revenue.

> For a certain size of customer this problem does go away

> We have an account manager, have received lots of support from Google in setting up, have been able to trial products in closed alpha before release, and haven't been hit by any meaningful deprecations

Too bad that level of customer service doesn't extend across their offerings and to smaller customers. A conservative estimate puts my wife's losses at just over $70,000 for the time her accounts were disabled. That doesn't include potential referrals from customers she would have gained during that time.

I've been an Amazon customer for years, for several of their products, and I have yet to experience an issue that wasn't handled promptly and to my satisfaction.

Several companies I've worked for have used AWS, and we experienced that same commitment to customer service. My network from those companies use AWS for their side projects and startups.

> we are not a Google competitor, and one of our major partners considered it a significant benefit of using us that we did not host on Amazon services.

Some companies don't use or have moved off of GCP for similar reasons.

$700k, really? For 7 weeks?

Must be nice.

Typo, corrected. See edit.

About $100k losses per week?

Is your wife hiring?

Typo, corrected. See edit.

It is a shame yes, and I certainly don't want to invalidate your wife's experience, I'm sure it was a really crap experience and difficult for her business.

I do see a lot of people extrapolating from what is essentially individual customer support up to company customer support. It's not far off extrapolating from a bad experience as an Amazon customer to AWS being a bad option – a comparison I don't often see being made.

I've seen terrible support from AWS on reasonably sized contracts, and I've seen good support from GCP on small contracts. While it's true that on average Amazon's consumer level support is better than Google's, and it may be true that AWS's support is often better than GCP's, these are not hard rules and I think the reality is that GCP is much better than many AWS users give it credit for.

Plus we're only talking about support here! I find GCP a far better product than AWS, but that's a bigger discussion.

> I do see a lot of people extrapolating from what is essentially individual customer support up to company customer support. It's not far off extrapolating from a bad experience as an Amazon customer to AWS being a bad option – a comparison I don't often see being made.

I think the difference with Amazon and some of it's competitors is that Amazon has made customer service a core business tenet as evidenced through "Customer Obsession" being their first leadership principle. It's ingrained in their culture, and it inspires confidence.

In 2015 or 2016, I setup a G-Suite (or whatever they called it back then) account for myself, the purpose was simply using Gmail with my own domain. So it was basically a "business" account with a single user, and I paid less than 5 bucks per month. One day I had a problem logging into my account and I submitted a support ticket. A few hours later, I got a call from a support engineer, who was very knowledgable about the underlying tech. He helped me live troubleshooting the issue and fixed it for me (I don't remember what the issue was but it was a user mistake on my end, forgot to toggle a switch or something).

I can't tell how shocking it was to me, because, my employer at the time ran on GCP, and that GCP account once got suspended by their bot due to some violation detection. We believed it was false, but we couldn't, for the life of us, get a human contact to clarify the situation.

Nowadays when I tell people story about my $5 account, no one believes me. Sometimes I couldn't even believe it myself!

I think GCP is a very different beast from the rest of Google and that its approach to business has essentially nothing to do with the rest of Google's. I'd also argue that GCP is different from Google Workspace (Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, etc.) is different from AdWords which in turn is different from anything Google offers direct to consumer. These businesses have different models and need to make different sorts of guarantees.

Khan Academy has been using Google App Engine since 2009 or '10. Since then, the App Engine APIs have changed dramatically (in a way that should make them more supportable going forward) and Python 2 has been supplanted by Python 3. Python 2 reached its official end of life on January 1, 2020. Despite that, we're still running Python 2 App Engine in production while we move to Go[1] and GCP is still supporting our use. (Note _most_ traffic to Khan Academy today is hitting our Go code and not Python 2.)

So, our experience with GCP and their long-term support of offerings has been good and we use quite a few of their services, but I don't think this has anything to do with their ability to fix the product-killing reputation elsewhere in the org.

[1]: https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project...

> I think GCP is a very different beast from the rest of Google and that its approach to business has essentially nothing to do with the rest of Google's

That's true, I think it's more of a branding issue. Everytime Google shuts down a service, it reflects poorly on their entire offer.

Your comment surprises me.

App Engine 2 has nothing compared to App Engine 1. At a previous job we relied on App Engine 1's, task queues, user management, NDB, blobstore, memcached, image resizing, and I hope I'm not forgetting anything. We had to change our code to use, cloud tasks, our own user management, a new NDB(more on that later), GCS, Redis and no resizing.

This took around 2 years!

on NDB, the issue was that it had a major overhaul and needed _a lot_ of work. we started updating when it was in beta, i.e. stable logic with an unstable API. But I found some major issues with it, a couple with transactions; one instance was, when using the cache, transactional deletes don't work(!).

I do need to give a shoutout to the NDB dev team here who relentlessly debugged everything I posted. That was good support.

Point being, as a developer this took away a lot of trust from me for GCP. And I thought how well this behavior aligns with Google's product killing yolo energy. Hopefully this new initiative will prevent my children from suffering from the same divine test of patience.

I agree that App Engine 2 is a totally different beast with very different features and that the migration path is challenging. I just think that by unbundling the services is a win overall... our application looks more like a normal Go webapp and could be placed atop Cloud Run or GKE if we wanted it there. Could even move it to another cloud if that particular app doesn't use datastore.

Probably the biggest thorn in our side with App Engine 2 is that they now have "VPC connectors" between our web servers and Cloud Memorystore, so our caches haven't been scaling as well as they did with App Engine 1's memcache. But Google does listen to feedback on such things and has been working with us on scaling the VPCs.

They've supported App Engine 1st gen for more than 10 years and I think they'll have an easier time with support and migrations to newer tech with the unbundled App Engine 2.

>> I just think that by unbundling the services is a win overall... our application looks more like a normal Go webapp<<

That is a valid use case but it's just one of the use cases for GAE. There is a use case for folks who wanted a pure serverless which means they were willing to be 'locked in' in exchange for not having to figure out or setup a bunch of servers/services and doing the integration. It was powerful for some folks to not have to worry about search, memcache, users, etc. You just drop an API link and you now have access to all of the above services.

At the end of the day, maybe Google decided that the number of folks with your own use case far outweighed those with the other use case that I described.

Generally, this is true but there are still exceptions and some of them are significant.

For example, even though GAE still supports applications built on Python2, they are (as far as I know) not expending effort on fixing issues in Python2 (which is fine). They are asking folks to migrate to Python3 but the issue is some of the key APIs supported in Python2 are not available in Python3. Things like memcache, search, users API are not supported on the Python3 platform. It's as if these APIs' have 'essentially been killed' for Python3.

Some of these 'gaps' creates opportunities for folks like me to build some tools/features to address them or write articles about 'hacks' around it but it gets some people worried and can be seen as part of 'killed by Google' issue

> Rumor has it (according to a report from The Information) that Google Cloud Platform is facing a 2023 deadline to beat AWS and Microsoft, or it will risk losing funding

Here's a scary scenario - Oracle Cloud is smaller but apparently trying to grow aggressively. Google might want to exit that market, and the Google/Oracle court battles aren't completely resolved yet...

What if Oracle and Google settle and swap Java for GCP ? Oracle gets a bigger cloud, Google gets to focus fully on Workplace, Ads and their consumer products, and we get to figure out if Route53s DNSSEC is now complete enough to move back from google cloud dns.

Google’s history with products is so poor I can never use them for a client, unless they explicitly ask for it or it’s in an RFP, if my business’s reputation is on the line.

Development is too expensive to screw around. Maybe if they’ve proven themselves in the next several years, I’ll believe it.

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