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Comment by willk | Hacker News Reader

Why are people still using Google services? They take your money and disappear when you need any help. Only way to actually get support is to know someone who knows someone or get enough social media support to have an engineer see it.

I de-Googled a couple of years ago and haven't looked back.

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Google cloud takes better care of their big customers. But they have a branding problem. Perhaps they should rename it alphabet cloud or something.

Perhaps they could be clear how big a customer needs to be to matter, so those not big enough can self select to providers with customer service.

(just finished moving a client's last GCP env from an acquisition to AWS)

I had a client who spent $1M+ per year on Google Ads, and Google would fly them to California each year to meet with their account manager.

I don't know what the equivalent GCP spend would be to get similar treatment. Presumably higher. So that's a data point, at least.

Not even their biggest customers get any good support.

You pay for it.

The problem with GCP is the same problem with Google overall — arrogance and lack of knowing how to deal with real people.

You have to respect your customer, the work they did and organizational constraints when you are coming in to a large company.

Maybe in other sectors, but not on Cloud. I've been an involuntary GCP customer on two accounts that were mid single digits millions a year and one that is among GCPs larger customers. In all cases, Google was a nightmare to work with. Support is better when you're spending absurd amounts, but it's still an awful partnership, distinctly worse than their competitors.

Because their products are really really good compared to the competition.

I’ve tried to switch away from chrome, from search, from gmail, from calendar, from drive and from docs… and none of the alternatives work as well as the google ones. Even old stuff that got killed off - RIP wave, RIP reader.

Game Helpin' Squad: A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

> I’ve tried to switch away from… search

FWIW, I’m absolutely in love with Kagi. I do realize the price makes it a non-starter for many, though.

Agreed. I don't understand how so many people are ok with trusting their whole digital lives to a platform with little, if any, access to real customer service by real human beings directly employed by Google. Or with essentially being Google's merchandise to be whored out to advertisers instead of being seen as customers.

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