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Comment by n0us | Hacker News Reader

It feels like every month or so there is another story like this about Google's customer support. For me it is one of the reasons I will *never* build on Google Cloud.

Combine this with their propensity to randomly shut down services and also jack up the prices of things by some wild amount overnight with no warning or justification. (Google Maps API and Kubernetes control plane.)

I would never consider risking all of my work on Google's reputation which is a shame because I'm sure the services themselves work relatively well. It feels like everyone outside of google is widely aware of these issues but everyone inside is completely blind to them.

Side Note: has anyone ever "won" an appeal with Google or does the system deny 100% of appeals?

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Google doesn't know how to do any non-competing product ... they ether build the best in class, and scale it so much that the edge cases don't matter or compete and lose each time from smartphones to cloud to all the services where it wasn't google in the lead by far.

What I understood from people who work there it's impossible to even know how's responsible for what, so chaotic organizational structure and lake of accountability / ownership / freedom to take something to the finish line.

Android is the world wide market leader of smartphone operating systems, why do you claim Google lost smartphones?

Profits, look at Apple. They're not even close to selling the most phones, but they're making the most money from the smartphone market. When you have one of two choices and the second choice is much less profitable, from a business perspective, you're losing.

Maybe, maybe not. Android is still a major, major feeder to other Google projects.

It's not a maybe, Apple continues to be the leader in the space when it comes to profits despite shipping 87% less units.

    "Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments."

I dont dispute the profitability, but I do think Android is a major contributor to Google’s bottom line and shouldn’t be discounted as worthless.

Pixel and Nexus have been business failures.

They were never really intended to "win" because Google values their partnerships with other phone mfgs. They spend way less on marketing the Pixels and they really exist just to keep mfgs honest and to showcase what Android can/should do when it's not inundated with bloatware and crappy firmware/drivers. Meanwhile, Samsung is trying to sell you a Tizen dishwasher with dedicated Bixby buttons that sells data to marketing agencies and will irreparably break within a few years.

They want to win. They just can't due to incompetence. If it were just to showcase what Android can be, they would have just kept the cheaper Android One or Nexus programs instead of going full Pixel.

I have been managing google ads for 12 years and I have never seen a suspended account win an appeal.

What do companies do when they get their accounts suspended/banned and they can’t get them reinstated?

Just go against Google’s warning by creating new accounts hoping they don’t “get caught”?

I'm hoping they choose a competing advertising agency, even if they lose the bulk of their ad revenue by doing so. Something is better than nothing, so I'm hoping that's the case because Google needs real competition in this space badly.

Choosing another agency only works if you have them create the account. That is not a good option because then they own it and they pretty much always abuse that ownership by telling the client the account spent more than it did.

For example they normally say they spent $10K when really they only spent $7K so they charge the client $10K plus fees and make an absurd amount of money.

Also the client cannot take their account to another agency if they want to fire the existing agency.

This is a big problem because the entire field is based on looking at historical performance of the account and making adjustments based on that data.

> For example they normally say they spent $10K when really they only spent $7K so they charge the client $10K plus fees and make an absurd amount of money.

That's just straight up fraud. It would be fairly easy to prove in court given Google has the truth and those records would be available via legal discovery.

They are just screwed.

I once worked with a company that was willing to do pretty much anything and spend pretty much anything to get back on Google and nothing worked.

You can create a new account but Google has a million ways to understand what you are doing.

Quite frankly, the fact that Google is big enough to produce these kinds of outcomes ought to be sufficient evidence by itself that it is a monopoly that shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place.

I won an appeal for suspicious payment. But my account is still suspended because it thinks I have unpaid balances, which I do not. They've ignored this appeal for 3 weeks.

I wrote this 10 years ago:

"The other issue with Google is there is no button I can push to send an email to complain to Google about my terrible user experience or to get support with improving it. Larry Page should be reading such an inbox, because this is a huge weakness for Google and they probably don't even realize how bad it stinks. "

It seems like the way to win an appeal with Google is to somehow get in the internal escalation queue, usually by knowing an engineer or getting lucky on HN or similar.

This has not been true for years. My google ads account was blocked, I had several google engineer friends create internal tickets for my case, and none of it worked out.

Sounds like you need better placed friends.

How friendly can people who work at Google really be?

Some of the most evil people have been super friendly. That's how they lure you in. It's kind of like The Firm. They lure you in with all of that glorious salary, all of those perks like free food, they let you work on projects that seem quite cool and almost decent at the beginning. Then, once you're accustomed to everything and are pretty locked in, they hit you with the shady stuff.

So you kind of have to be friendly, otherwise, no new recruits would join up unless they were just sadists already.

That’s just acting friendly, which is not what I meant. Maybe I should have written “helpful” instead of “friendly”.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence in these threads about how friendly Googlers used to assist with these issues before management prevented it.

Exactly. People who work at Google can’t be friendly, whether they want to or not.

Sounds like you would relish living in a communist dictatorship, where your position in society was determined by how highly placed your friends were.

No, I just live in this reality. If the friends you have are not high enough on the food chain to get what you need done, then it's time to make friends in higher places.

… which makes you sound precisely like the people living in a communist dictatorship.

That's not unique to dictatorships, and communist ones least of all.

amen to this. They should form no part of anyone's core business, unless you're abusing a free feature of theirs.

Is it possible they're doing this in mass to benefit financially somehow?

I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Any benefit would be overwhelmed by the reputational damage of "if you use Google there's a non-zero chance they'll completely rugpull you for no reason and with no possibility of appeal".

Even cynical me would think this isn't true, but willing to be shown differently.

However, I would be willing to believe that it's just laziness in how they are trying to protect themselves from something that has a similar look to known existing behaviors to malicious users. If an account shows any behavior that matches the same activity patterns that has been used by malicious users in the past, just shut down that account. The laziness comes from how they handle those accounts once flagged in that they just shut them down. The non-lazy method would probably not scale well, so they again chose the lazy way to not do anything else.

How do you benefit financially by refusing to take people’s money?

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