6 ms·

If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid somethi

by umvi 7y ago

If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don't want to support anymore.

jkeuhlen 7y ago
The thing that scares me the most, is some automated system deciding that I did something wrong without telling me and banning not only my Google Cloud account but also all of my personal google accounts.
- btown 7y ago
  Or, alternately, some automated system linking personal and work identities, a misunderstanding occurring on a personal side project of any of our developers (say, a misconfigured email send that's flagged as spammy, or someone's personal blog that's hacked and has malware uploaded)... and our entire startup going offline as a result. It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
  - res0nat0r 7y ago
    GCP has the same support model as AWS. You don't get to enter cases with either free plan, your support is posting on forums and hoping for answers. If you want to pay then you have different levels of access to varying response times. The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here. https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/
eddieh 7y ago
The headline seems to imply that Google will likely EOL Cloud if they don’t win in 3 years. That doesn’t instill confidence.
- peteretep 7y ago
  A CTO betting the farm on Google’s cloud is displaying reckless naivety. Google’s arrogance towards its customers is legendary.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    So is a CTO betting on Amazon never turning into Oracle.
    - zwily 7y ago
      It’s a game of probabilities, and right now P(Amazon turns into Oracle) < P(Google cancels GCP in 3 years).
    - freehunter 7y ago
      Amazon turning into Oracle is bad but it's a lot less disruptive to a company's operations than GCP shutting down.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    We're on Google because we're not betting the farm on them or anyone else. Google has the best Kubernetes hosting, but using Kubernetes allows us to move if anything drastic changes.
    - kazen44 7y ago
      does it though? Kubernetes is a complex system, and many if not most providers have a "okeish" setup at best.
scarface74 7y ago
This whole idea of basing your entire company’s infrastructure on a non responsive provider is so foreign to me. We have the regular old Business Support Plan with AWS and we can always reach a live person by opening a ticket and starting a live chat. It’s only $100/month minimum or 10% of your monthly spend with discounts. We go through an APN so I doubt we are paying that much even though we are a small company. All of your vendors are just as responsive.
- brown9-2 7y ago
  We have a similar plan with GCP and honestly the customer support has usually been great.
dalrympm 7y ago
Having gone through a 6 week long process just to get a working replacement for my Pixel 3, I vowed not to use Google Cloud for fear of a similar opaque customer support experience. I can't fathom the amount of organizational change that would be required to make Google a customer focused organization nor how they could possibly communicate that change to all the people they've burned.
deleted 7y ago
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stoicShell 7y ago
Google sure is nowhere near as capable or even willing as Microsoft or Amazon; heck even IBM through Red Hat could prove a much better steward for its enterprise customers. But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure. So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows. Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever. This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market. When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.
thinkingkong 7y ago
Im also wondering what “best” or “winning” means in this context. Theres no way they’ll surpass AWS in revenue in 3 years so whats the dimension of quality here?
crazygringo 7y ago
You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products (nonexistent) with support for paid services. Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure. Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas. I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud. It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  If your company has a widespread perception to have some of the worst support in the industry you have a problem, even if that perception isn't entirely accurate in all cases.
  - rurp 7y ago
    Any inaccurate perceptions users have are Google's fault anyway. They name every product "Google {{service_name}}" and do nothing to differentiate which services have real support and which ones only let you yell into the void. The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.
- thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
  Part of Google's problem is that Amazon will give you a refund on a shirt you ordered and then have customer support walk you through setting up AWS services to run your website. Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    Google is quite the opposite, they only do things that scale. Making customers happy isn't something that scales, so they avoid it actively.
brown9-2 7y ago
As someone who actually usually GCP professionally, I’ve never had a problem with their support process.
- fooster 7y ago
  Their payed support is terrible and getting worse. We've had no end of issues with being told incorrect advice, being advised on how to administer our systems (when its very clear the problem is with the infrastructure). We've had disks corrupted, which is theory impossible. The list goes on and on an on.
- osipov 7y ago
  As an Xoogler and someone who used GCP professionally I had numerous issues with their support, especially when helping customers launch brand new projects.
tozeur 7y ago
It’s interesting seeing the rapid turn-around of opinions on HN. Before everyone said GCP offered the best experience and disregarded Azure. Now people bag on GCP and praise AWS and Azure for their customer/service support. People are quick to grab their pitchforks.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by umvi 7y ago

jkeuhlen 7y ago

The thing that scares me the most, is some automated system deciding that I did something wrong without telling me and banning not only my Google Cloud account but also all of my personal google accounts.

btown 7y ago
Or, alternately, some automated system linking personal and work identities, a misunderstanding occurring on a personal side project of any of our developers (say, a misconfigured email send that's flagged as spammy, or someone's personal blog that's hacked and has malware uploaded)... and our entire startup going offline as a result. It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
- res0nat0r 7y ago
  GCP has the same support model as AWS. You don't get to enter cases with either free plan, your support is posting on forums and hoping for answers. If you want to pay then you have different levels of access to varying response times. The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here. https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/

eddieh 7y ago

The headline seems to imply that Google will likely EOL Cloud if they don’t win in 3 years. That doesn’t instill confidence.

peteretep 7y ago
A CTO betting the farm on Google’s cloud is displaying reckless naivety. Google’s arrogance towards its customers is legendary.
- closeparen 7y ago
  So is a CTO betting on Amazon never turning into Oracle.
  - zwily 7y ago
    It’s a game of probabilities, and right now P(Amazon turns into Oracle) < P(Google cancels GCP in 3 years).
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Amazon turning into Oracle is bad but it's a lot less disruptive to a company's operations than GCP shutting down.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  We're on Google because we're not betting the farm on them or anyone else. Google has the best Kubernetes hosting, but using Kubernetes allows us to move if anything drastic changes.
  - kazen44 7y ago
    does it though? Kubernetes is a complex system, and many if not most providers have a "okeish" setup at best.

scarface74 7y ago

This whole idea of basing your entire company’s infrastructure on a non responsive provider is so foreign to me. We have the regular old Business Support Plan with AWS and we can always reach a live person by opening a ticket and starting a live chat. It’s only $100/month minimum or 10% of your monthly spend with discounts. We go through an APN so I doubt we are paying that much even though we are a small company. All of your vendors are just as responsive.

brown9-2 7y ago
We have a similar plan with GCP and honestly the customer support has usually been great.

dalrympm 7y ago

Having gone through a 6 week long process just to get a working replacement for my Pixel 3, I vowed not to use Google Cloud for fear of a similar opaque customer support experience. I can't fathom the amount of organizational change that would be required to make Google a customer focused organization nor how they could possibly communicate that change to all the people they've burned.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stoicShell 7y ago

Google sure is nowhere near as capable or even willing as Microsoft or Amazon; heck even IBM through Red Hat could prove a much better steward for its enterprise customers. But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure. So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows. Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever. This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market. When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.

thinkingkong 7y ago

Im also wondering what “best” or “winning” means in this context. Theres no way they’ll surpass AWS in revenue in 3 years so whats the dimension of quality here?

crazygringo 7y ago

You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products (nonexistent) with support for paid services. Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure. Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas. I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud. It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.

mullingitover 7y ago
If your company has a widespread perception to have some of the worst support in the industry you have a problem, even if that perception isn't entirely accurate in all cases.
- rurp 7y ago
  Any inaccurate perceptions users have are Google's fault anyway. They name every product "Google {{service_name}}" and do nothing to differentiate which services have real support and which ones only let you yell into the void. The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.
thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
Part of Google's problem is that Amazon will give you a refund on a shirt you ordered and then have customer support walk you through setting up AWS services to run your website. Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.
- mark-r 7y ago
  Google is quite the opposite, they only do things that scale. Making customers happy isn't something that scales, so they avoid it actively.

brown9-2 7y ago

As someone who actually usually GCP professionally, I’ve never had a problem with their support process.

fooster 7y ago
Their payed support is terrible and getting worse. We've had no end of issues with being told incorrect advice, being advised on how to administer our systems (when its very clear the problem is with the infrastructure). We've had disks corrupted, which is theory impossible. The list goes on and on an on.
osipov 7y ago
As an Xoogler and someone who used GCP professionally I had numerous issues with their support, especially when helping customers launch brand new projects.

tozeur 7y ago

It’s interesting seeing the rapid turn-around of opinions on HN. Before everyone said GCP offered the best experience and disregarded Azure. Now people bag on GCP and praise AWS and Azure for their customer/service support. People are quick to grab their pitchforks.

deleted 7y ago

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