Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?
calculatedriskblog.com
calculatedriskblog.com
Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓
Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓
Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓
Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket (which will never come). I feel like it's almost a right of passage these days to rely heavily on a Google service, only to have something go wrong and be left out in the cold.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...
(Unless, of course, you work in an industry where longer retention times are mandated.)
"Well, that part about Google having customer service was pretty good."
That said: I've found Google personnel highly responsive (though not always immediately so) to issues I've raised. Most recently with the Data Liberation Front's lead emailing me directly (after finding he couldn't reply to my G+ posts because I'd disabled interactions there) while on sabbatical to find out what's up.
Not to say that Google don't have their warts and have been highly insensitive to human-factors issues of late. But even some pretty testy and frustrated folk have found that there are contacts from deep within the machine.
Though JOOTSing -- jumping out of the (nominal support/ticket) system -- does seem to be rather too frequently required.
I won't say I haven't been a thorn in Google's side (large or small I'm not entirely sure). But I've managed to develop some level of a relationship with some folks on the inside. I'm largely in the process of extricating myself from their services, but I had seen multiple positive responses.
I can only imagine it's similarly frustrating on the inside. Remember: they're trying to address the needs of hundreds of millions (or more) users with a pretty finite staff. It's the dual-lever challenge of automated systems: you can provide for the world with a staff of 40, but you're stuck with providing for the world with a staff of 40. Unless you come up with ways of 1) automating support 2) self-support and 3) very effective triage you're going to have horror stories.
A problem of their own devising. I don't have any sympathy for them, they've intentionally built up their image of a company of geniuses who hire the best of the best, and they have made it a primary corporate goal to acquire those hundreds of millions of users.
I speculate that the reason they have effectively zero customer support is that to employ and train that number of people would require them to appear obviously as a clone of Walmart, GE, or AT&T (et al), which is necessary to become in order to deal with that kind of headcount.
I actually made the comment more in the spirit of a "hey, you HN types looking at starting your own worldwide Web based service / company, heads-up, this is a problem you'll face."
That said: I've actually pretty much given your "they're Google, they're smart, they can figure this out" response when I've have noted weaknesses in Google's response / user support/service.
Though there are some companies / organizations which have gone a long way to building very-low-overhead organizations. Wikipedia and Craigslist both come to mind (and yes, they've had their problems).
Another story emerged out of the ACA/Obamacare rollout. One news item I heard concerning it noted that when Social Security rolled out, there were staffed offices located in cities and towns throughout the US where people could go for support. That's something which the online/automated world has largely done away with.
Though the thought occurs to me: what would the required infrastructure (and cost of development) be for producing a paper-record based application process for ACA? Would it not perhaps be simpler than the online version?
When Social Security rolled out, there wasn't any other choice. (Well, paper mail.)
Phone support might have been an option. Even if household phones were rare, most people could get to a location which had a phone. However 1-800 (toll-free) lines didn't exist yet (though you could reverse charges with operator assistance). Hrm ... I'd heard a tale that 800 toll-free service began as the result of a request from President Ford for some way for the White House to accept calls from citizens, though Wikipedia's history of toll-free service doesn't make any mention, might just be a red herring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-free_telephone_number#Hist...
More to the point: the idea of individually staffing offices is now pretty much a non-starter. Though I wonder what the real economics are compared with creating a national-scale Web infrastructure.
I'd say that the base instance of something like this would be expanding Medicare instead of inventing ACA, but that seems to have been politically untenable. There are certainly problems there, as well as in the VA system, but the point remains...
rite of passage
Doubtful. Getting support from Google is pretty much impossible (you do have slightly increased chances since you've put it on HN however).
If I were you, I'd initiate a domain transfer to a different registrar that will actually provide support when you need it before your domain expires.
Even if you're lucky enough to have Google resolve the issue this time, you may not be so lucky in the future and there are numerous domain registrars that would handle your domain better than Google will.
Me too, as such, you have my sympathies.
Google often uses services like domainsbyproxy.com to reserve domains for users. Your DNS console is buried in something like that. It's janky and frustrating... but figure out your DNS access info, "unlock" your domain, and get it away from Google to avoid these sorts of problems.
I can't suggest a better solution, but wow - it sucks at the moment.
Edit: Would it be possible to find out from the friend at Google if they are doing anything to report this anomaly to users? The author can't be the only person this happened to, and given that Google knows this, perhaps it would be useful if the error message reflected what was going on?
Perhaps fixing that error message would be a better use of resources than trying to improve support?
But that is just a theory, my experience of late is that when Google stops talking about a service, and responses stop coming back, the reason is that the service is on the list to be killed off and anyone inside Google that was working on it, already knows that, and have already transferred to some other project.
Also, do you have any communication from when you configured the account? That would be useful.
What may have happened is you set up a Google Apps For Your Domain account (which would have been free at the time of your registration). If that is the case you would need to login into Google Wallet with your Google Apps account - xxxx@calculatedriskblog.com and update the payment information for that account (as opposed to your normal Gmail).
I've run into this reporting issues for Google Now and Picasa Web. Moderators continually move or delete reports of issues. When you explain the situation and why X is more appropriate than Y you get radio silence.
Has anyone actually gotten real support from Google for paid applications? Is it limited to the Groups?
"If you have any questions about our Java 6 to Java 7 upgrade, you can reach us at google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration@googlegroups.com"
when I sent an email to that address I got a bounce with the message:
"We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group."
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Also Calculated Risk is a rather famous blog in certain circles, so it's kind of funny to see some of the comments here that imply it's an obscure blog whose blogmaster lucked into a front page HN post.
I would get the domain and move it somewhere else.
Google brought in $12.5B in advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2013, and only $1.2B in non-advertising revenue in the same period.
So, who spent 12 billion in Google ads in 3 months? divide that by 12,000 entities who spent 1 million each per quarter. Or 12,000,000 entities who spent a thousand dollars. Do you think there are enough geeks and small advertisers out there to add up to 4 billion dollars a month? Do you think there are enough small business people out there to make up that? It's the large consumer products that make up the bulk of Google's income: the Ford, GM, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, etc. These are Google's customers.
Google has locked horns with Facebook on getting these advertisers. Yahoo too gets a fair bit of that. These are the Google customers, nobody else. If these advertisers spurn Google, the company will spin out of control. That's in spite of of $56B in cash. They burn 10+ billion a quarter, so they don't have that long to live at full bore, or they would have to cut painfully. They are big enough with so much staff that there's very few sources of income that could replace $12.5 billion a quarter. So you bet they will, hum, accommodate, the Coca-Cola advertising executive's phone calls.
If Google wants to treat such low priority customers like non-entities, they are free to do so, but lets not pretend like they should act this way, because they shouldn't. It might be fine for them to do this in the short term, but in the long term it bleeds a lot of good will, which eventually catches up with every company no matter how big.
I'm talking about $1k to $10k (in orders of magnitude) which, yes, it's not top tier but it's not cheap as well
With Google, if you're not paying, you're the product. And if you're paying, you're still the product.
I'm told by contacts inside the Borg that things have gotten better in the last few years -- for example, now you can find a phone number to reach a call center that will /dev/null your ticket for you rather than having to /dev/null it yourself -- but the last few times I needed it having a $X0,000 a year account didn't rate a reply. I'm reliably told that $Y00,000 a month accounts didn't have a transformatively better experience, although, quote, "At least they'll lie to me. It's better than silence. If you collect enough lies you can triangulate off of them."
Times have changed.
I'm not talking about less than $1 million a year account.
The problem is that changing CC number by following link in the email will not update your CC. You need to go to https://wallet.google.com and update your CC.
Words fail me.
Google probably, appropriately, calculates the cost of providing good customer support to hundreds of millions of people as way too high. But by doing so, they do leave open the door to smaller companies to compete, not on the product, but on the service and support.
Google could, at the very least, make sure that it provides sufficient support for all billing related issues. If a customer is paying for a product and there's a problem with their billing, they should be able to get a person on the phone or web chat to resolve it if the online tools are insufficient.
"Surprised" doesn't quite capture my response to that.
I'm still not a fan of GoDaddy the company, GoDaddy the infrastructure, or GoDaddy the horrifyingly bad control panel "interface", but GoDaddy support could teach Google a lot.
Other services I tried:
Namecheap: Decent prices, great support, beware of domains with certain keywords (would require approval).
Gandi: Decent prices (Free Whois guard), poor support, beware of moral clause in TOS.
you might be able mitigate the problem by upgrading to a google apps business account and receive support through it. i've used their email support through a paid apps account several time, the problems were always resolved promptly.
He picked up his phone on the first ring.
I briefly described the issue (and how I'd determined it was a problem), he told me he'd have the appropriate manager get in touch with me later that day. I received that call 15 minutes later, and worked with the manager (submitting specific emails and identifying where on their network the problems were manifesting) for a couple of months during which time the spam volumes fell well over 90%.
Part of the trick is knowing how to navigate / manipulate the system, and finding a problem they acknowledge as theirs. But in that particular case (and a small handful of others) I found the company highly responsive.
Now, several years later when I'd bought both a shrinkwrap product and support contract to specifically resolve a data issue with a product of theirs, I got sandbagged. Demanded my money back for the contract.
And no, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But they do (at times at least) know how to run a business.
And when searching I actually end up finding a ticket/question in some MS system with an official response. With Google I far too often end up in a Google Group with tens of complaints but no solutions.
EDIT: this comment was made under the original title "Calculated Risk: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th? (calculatedriskblog.com)"
They probably don't want to pay $$$$ for someone else to move it and/or host it. Migrating years of posts and all the comments... that's a decent sized job. Even if the export/import to some other blogging engine was nearly perfect (Hint: it's not all roses and perfume), there's a dozen or more billable hours involved to make it run exactly the way it did before on another host. That's probably more than he spends in a year at the current location.
...and so on. There are plenty of good reasons not to move it.