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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

Even when you have paid Google products that come with support, it is really awful. They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. Just a simple clarification of something in their documentation. I was already under pressure to migrate to Office360, I stopped fighting after that.

My employer is a huge AWS user and Google is constantly chasing us with a treasure chest of free credit to migrate over, their prices are significantly cheaper, but everyone agrees it’s worth the premium to stay with AWS simply because they answer the phone.

(If you have never used AWS’s enterprise support, those guys are worth every penny.)

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I've first hand experience with managing a google workspace (50 users) and an Azure AD (30 users). With google workspace, the chat is two click away and the guys now their stuff. With Azure AD, no support, no chat, except "here is a list of consultant in your area that provide support". And I pay twice as much to microsoft ...

I work at a company with >1000 google workspace users.

That's enough that someone at Google will acknowledge what you're reporting is a bug on their end, and that they can reproduce it. But it's not enough to get the bug fixed.

The support may be good if you're asking questions they've heard before - or if you need something like an account lock reset, which the support folks have a button for. But if the problem you're encountering requires a code change? Not so much.

(If you're wondering, the bug is "in Google Drive, users with third-party cookies disabled get stuck in a redirect loop when downloading files or viewing videos, as the cross-origin request to googleusercontent.com attempts to redirect to get an auth cookie that never arrives" )

I’m sure that in the mind of Google they are doing a favor by letting us give them money, wanting support is just ungrateful. Wanting a bug fix is just obscene. They have 150,000 PhDs, aren’t we bold to question them!

Turns out, having a PhD is a negative when it comes to closing bugs.

This stems from Google not being a service company. Support for products is mostly like this. You can submit a bug report but that does not mean they will help you.

We have a saying here that goes something like "don't buy pizza at a burger joint"... Don't buy services from a advertising / products company.

>Don't buy services from a advertising / products company.

I will remember this. Thanks.

That must have been fixed. I got a message to enable third party cookies for drive.google.com. Even with a link to docs on how to do it iirc.

I just tested, and it's not fixed.

> I work at a company with >1000 google workspace users.

> That's enough that someone at Google will acknowledge what you're reporting is a bug on their end, and that they can reproduce it. But it's not enough to get the bug fixed.

I will try to remember that the next time I deal with an open-source project, either as a user raising an issue, or as a project contributor helping solve such issues.

Often, we do not realize how lucky we are that contributors to open-source projects help fix the bugs which we report.

I hesitated to post this comment, another anecdote with zero recourse... Then realised the fact I hesitated is more concerning.

Google hold too much control over the internet and the majority of internet users lives, to the point where it's almost authoritarian: They can screw with your personal life and potentially your business without any recourse, causing the effects such as the one I just experienced. I'm not suggesting some large conspiracy against those who oppose Google's affect on the web, and many of us will continue to complain openly and loudly about them because that is our culture. But the effect their position has on freedom of speech is still present, it's a natural instinct, it increases the chances of a large portion of the population to remain silent out of personal fear - and that is concerning.

> Even when you have paid Google products that come with support, it is really awful

Once I subscribed to YouTube Music (paid!) family plan, but my wife's account would always say that she is in another country and can not join the plan. I tried everything - the support never even bothered to reply to my emails. I cancelled the plan and since then I keep seeing the same ads for the premium service every time I open the YT mobile app.

FWIW I had the same problem a few months ago, and they did eventually sort me out. This surprised me, given Google's reputation. I was on the 1-month "free trial" membership, and always planned to switch to the single-person membership if they didn't get it sorted out, so I wasn't really out any money during that time.

(And in fact, what actually happened was they hadn't sorted me out by the time the free trial was up, so I cancelled it and switched to the individual membership. They managed to get things sorted out a week or two after that, but I'm still on the individual membership; my wife just shares my account ID.)

I can second that. Lots of G services think I'm in another country (Spain specifically), so the sites load in Spanish by default, along with other minor headaches.

I work for a small company and we used to use AWS. I think their support sucks. Especially since there is no group accounts and the bills went to another persons account that ended his job at the company.

I had to login to both mine and his account in order to complete my support request or they wouldn't help me. When I called them it was like any crappy indian support team which I barely could understand.

Compare that to DigitalOcean for example, there you can actually group resources for an org and their support is actually knowledgeable about their products and can answer questions even about implementation details. Also, you don't need a PhD in order to understand the UI which is a great plus.

> They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google.

I find that extremely difficult to believe without more context. Google support isn’t that bad. I’ve had a mediocre-to-good experience with it over the years.

With that said, while I agree that aws business and enterprise support is worth the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, so is the five bucks a month for a google workspace account that includes support.

A few years back I wanted to call then but didn’t find a number. How do you contact Google’s support?

If you have a google workspace account and need google support, you can go in the admin console, help section in the top right, there is a contact form with phone and chat options.

What if you can't log in?

Then there's this magic link: https://support.google.com/a/contact/recovery_form (calling it magic because it's not very obvious how to find it; I had to look it up in the HN comments)

Can confirm. Despite strong reservations about moving from one behemoth to another, the support from Amazon has been light years better (both on the consumer side and AWS). Embarassingly better.

> Google is constantly chasing us with a treasure chest of free credit to migrate

The only item in Google's business playbook...

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