Gone Google? Do yourself a favor: don’t. | Hacker News Reader

Gone Google? Do yourself a favor: don’t.

indieloper.com

66 pointsaliebschner48 comments

If you want a short version of the story, here it is: it took 5 days (approximatively 150 hours) to get the first reply from the so called “Google Enterprise Support”. And that’s the good news. The bad news is that most of the Google products don’t come with any kind of support whatsoever, unless you are internet famous.

Yeah, Google apparently uses Digg as its CRM system.

For some reason I can't get to the article. Anyway as another anecdotal data point: We have a few Google Search Appliances where I work. When one of them broke (rather catastrophically) Google Support was on top of it and the problem was fixed relatively quickly.

Edit: I suppose this is a case of "you get what you pay for". Google Search Appliances are non-trivially expensive. I guess they wouldn't be able to get away with bad support for those.

I threw money (RAM) at the problem and the server is back up, at least it is now ;-)

If you want some details on the story, here it is: this wasn't for any service he actually paid money for. If I give you something for free and it breaks, you are entitled to keep both pieces. Expecting anything else is ... confusing.

Nah. Here are the details: I think I would be able to reproduce the issue but I have no way to contact them other than an abandoned "official" google group. I call this a crappy way to run a "free" service.

How does that reply have anything to do with what you're replying to?

  Post: "you are not entitled to support"
  Reply: "i can reproduce this problem, but i can't get support"

In the world of free stuff most of the time support is not granted. "You are free to e-mail us, and we are free to ignore you" -- that's fine. In the world of google free stuff it's "we made a business decision not to give our customers the opportunity to contact us", to my biased opinion this decision is bad because not only I'm not able to ask for support but I can't even fill in a bug report.

How do you even know that the problem is reproducible? You've only managed to trigger it once.

He was going to Google Search to see if anyone else had the problem, but he swore to never use Google again.

Oh, the ... irony?

Then use something else. You're not locked in, there is no contract, you aren't invested (no money has changed hands); why not just move on?

For me it's been six months with two emails. I replied within minutes to both. They overcharged me 250$ or so.

And even though I should be peeved, I love their services and would never change :)

You get what you pay for. Google Apps for Enterprise is $50/yr. Not sure what you pay for feedburner, but the bottom line is that Google doesn't sell support. You email them and you wait.

If it doesn't work for you, go elsewhere. It's obviously a business decision they've made by weighing the loss of customers like you against the cost of carrying a huge hands-on support organization.

I disagree. If I pay a company, they owe me support when their product breaks. If that's going to be limited to email support, not to mention non-responsive email support, they need to disclose that upfront.

I disagree. There is a contract. What is written in it? That counts. (I am not saying bad customer service is smart business.)

So you're saying you disagree that they should be upfront with their own limitations as a customer service provider, even though they are soliciting you to buy customer service from them?

Playing "here's the catch" with customers isn't right. When the product you are selling fails, you must be available to help.

It really depends if there is something like "Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act" in your country (that one particular is from Ireland). So, in a nutshell, contract doesn't trump law, ever.

You get what you pay for.

It would be much less frustrating if this were the case, actually. Empirically, $15,000 is not enough for them to routinely return email within a week. In many businesses, that would be "Yes sir, right away sir, can I get you a cup of tea while you wait sir" territory.

Plus, from what I've heard, it doesn't get any better for the next two orders of magnitude, either.

$15,000 over the course of how long? To them that's a very small fry. Many of their AdWords customers spend tens/hundreds of thousands per month. Those people are getting support.

I have had Google give horrendus CS on accounts on that scale. 100k is still small fry to Google.

But that shouldn't matter. No one is trying to get Eric Schmidt on the phone. $150k, $15k or even $150 is plenty relative to returning a phone call, which is what it costs them & what your relative fry-ness should be measured against.

I have had Google reps disappear (say 'I will call you back in 20m,' then not answer emails, phone calls etc. for days) on accounts many time bigger then that.

Personally, my rule of thumb is not that you get what you pay for, but that you don't get what you don't pay for.

I use Google Apps for Domains Enterprise at my place of employment and have always found their support to be very quick and responsive.

My gripe is they always have Apps for Domains features after everything else. For example, I can't upgrade users beyond 25GB of storage even though this is available for normal google users now.

I'm also waiting for GApps to grow their size, but it's possible that the paying customers are last because Google treats them most carefully. Roll stuff out to your paying customers last, when you know it's solid.

This mostly applies to features, not size limits, but it could be behind their thinking in general.

Yes, but I still think they should have some courtesy and answer an email, when they broke your feed URL...

To be honest, the feed URL is still up and running and working great -- however it's not bound to any of the two google accounts that are supposed to be bound with it. So: feed is working but I cannot change settings, setup a redirect, et cetera.

With Apps Premier edition ($50/user/year) you get a special PIN number. I've always gotten pretty rapid responses from their team on most support requests using this feature.

The 150 hours reply came after a request using that PIN number.

Where do you mention that you used the PIN number to get a reply in your blog post? Where do you mention in your blog post if you are or aren't paying Google for support? You really need to be clear about what you're talking about here. You mention that you had trouble getting support for FeedBurner -- a free Google product -- yet you are complaining about a 150 hour response time from 'Google Enterprise Services?' Huh?

So you're saying that, as a paying customer for Google Apps for Domains (I'm assuming since you don't mention any of these details in your post), you couldn't get the same level of support on another Google product that you're not paying for? When you pay for support with Google Product 1, it doesn't entitle you to support for Google Product 2. It might be good business for Google to give you extra support on Google Product 2 to keep you as a happy, paying customer of Google Product 1, but don't suffer from any delusions that just because you pay Google money at all that you deserve support for everything that they offer you.

I'm not saying that this is a good way for Google to run their business, but I'm having a hard time seeing the huge issue that you're making this out to be. It really comes across as you getting upset at Google and hoping that you'll get everyone else pissed at Google too (or you're just trying to drive site-traffic).

> So you're saying that, as a paying customer for Google Apps for Domains (I'm assuming since you don't mention any of these details in your post), you couldn't get the same level of support on another Google product that you're not paying for?

I'm just saying I am unhappy with their customer support, being it for Google Apps Premier Edition or any of the free services.

You're still not telling us if you're paying or not for feedburner, if you're not paying, don't expect much support unless you're really naive. Not saying whether you're paying or not is dishonest.

Edit: you're not paying for feedburner as it's not part of their Enterprise support. So your critic of "not going google" is irrelevant.

> being it for Google Apps Premier Edition or any of the free services.

Where do you talk about your support experiences with Google Apps Premier Edition? Your blog post only talks about your support woes with FeedBurner.

Are you extrapolating that you don't like Google's customer support for Google Apps Premier Edition just because you don't like their support for FeedBurner? Or do you really have a 'bad support story' in relation to Google Apps Premier Edition too?

Or you complain and embarrass them by adding your voice to the chorus of bad customer service stories extent, and they gradually develop a negative image that tarnishes their "do no evil" mantra a bit and weakens their credibility for when a larger PR blunder occurs.

They are free to do business this way if they like and their customers are also free to pass it on by word of mouth. That's how the market works.

Also, you're being blithe. Google (as most businesses) tries to make it as easy as possible for customers to convert onto their products. They don't put "Oh, by the way, we are able to offer these great services partly because we don't offer support" on their call-to-action pages, and people don't typically expect that it's virtually impossible to obtain customer support, so that's not something they're likely to research up front. By the time they realize their data is tied up in Google, and Google doesn't provide reasonable support, it's too late. It's not like you need support all the time, but when you need it, you REALLY need it.

Thank you for writing it in plain english -- I really wish I could upvote you more than once because it's one of the best replies in this discussion (for that, and for bringing up "blithe", that I didn't know of).

The problem with this is that in a lot of areas Google enters then wipes out the competition by offering the service for free. It's extremely hard for competitors to gain a foothold in a market when a huge competitor is giving the product away for free.

Except it's not free; they earn a profit by having you use their services or else they wouldn't do it. They push competitors out of the market, then either start charging or make money off filling the service with ads (have you taken a look at google search results lately? about 1/3 of it is now ads). It's the equivalent of selling a physical product at a loss until you run competitors out of business (or discourage them from ever entering the market in the first place).

What happens when there are no viable alternatives to "go elsewhere"? As others have said, network effects have already turned a lot of internet companies into monopolies. If I don't like using Adwords, do I really have an alternative at this point?

The blog only has four posts on it? Why is he even worried about feeds at this point?

I think this is blown way out of proportion. A new blog like that with only four posts probably only gets a few visitors a day. He's getting more traffic over this "controversy" post than he would ever get from a feed.

He should thank Feedburner for messing up his feed because it gave him something to write about that would bring in traffic. At any rate the loss of the feed is nothing terrible when you consider how new the blog is.

I tried a hack to find out how many subscribers he has but he has feed "awareness" disabled.

https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?...

At any rate, I doubt he even has more than a few subscribers. No wonder Google didn't consider his "issue" to be high priority.

I think Rackspace is hitting a sweet spot with hosted email and calendaring and 24x7 service.

I think there are many niches, yet untapped in hosted services, where the cost may be a little more than google, but the service may be a lot better (another example Heroku).

Cost less and give more, that's all it takes to steal customers from a competitor. Of course "Cost" doesn't just refer to the price, as someone who has "spent" their time trying to get support from Google can tell you. And "More" doesn't just refer to features or services, it's about the value to the customer.

I think you mean TCO.

I knew it had a name! :-) Thanks.

This is one of the stupidest thing I have read in a long time. Sorry, but someone had to tell you the way it is. Having hissy fit over a trivial issue such as feed burner?

Create a new feed to the account you wanted to transfer. make a post about the update. Readers from all feed will still get your post, because the changes are not instant. Wait 24 hours. Problem solved.

Assuming you are not the one who made a mistake and deleted your feed. I have been using feedburner for a long time and transferred my old feeds to google feeds with no problem.

If you run a site with thousands of subscribers that depends on FeedBurner for serving feeds, it's a little worrying. There are things you can do to reduce the pain but it's still a sticky point.

Are you saying that it's worrying that Google gives no support for FeedBurner or that it's worrying that a large site is dependent on FeedBurner?

The former. I can see why my message is ambiguous now, but I'm worried about sites being at Google's mercy, rather than criticizing them for using a service that, at one point, was run by a well staffed and very competent team.

As far as Google acquisitions go, FeedBurner was by far the worst IMHO in terms of really sucking the heart and soul out of a product.

You want Enterprise support for Feedburner? LOL. As far as I know they don't offer that, and I wouldn't have expected it. You're talking about Google giving support for one of their products which isn't actually covered by their Enterprise policy, even though you might have had a product that was covered, the issue you were having was for a product that wasn't.

Their Enterprise Policy explicitly states which are services covered and which are not.

Is this loading for other people? For me there's no response.

hackernews killed the server and it's really FUBAR (can't even ssh to it and try to fix it) sorry about that [edit: back up now]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com