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Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://new

by ximeng 7y ago

Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.

mzz80 7y ago
No one likes a poor customer experience. But businesses will always choose a poor customer experience over the risk of a business shutting down. That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.
- __jal 7y ago
  It took us about half a year to get billing set up with them. Completely pointless shit show that basically every other company on the planet manages, with Google's own unique weirdness about talking with icky customers. It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).
dragonsh 7y ago
Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples. I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.
- harikb 7y ago
  > Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing? I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Same for Facebook. You cannot make any negative comments about react or other Fb tech
- 1MoreThing 7y ago
  This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true. No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
  - throwaway29303 7y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-pr-firm-google https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it. HN is no longer niche. > Who has the budget for this? Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens. Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
  - topkai22 7y ago
    It's possible, but the reputation management people also worry a fair amount about getting caught astroturfing or running bot nets. There are a lot less risky ways of accomplishing the same goal- pushing positive stories, honestly responding, using SEP techniques to get ahead of negative news in search results, etc.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    > Who has the budget for this? Every enterprise, basically. You subscribe to social media monitoring as a service, they monitor the fire hose and flip on the bat signal as needed. It’s dirt cheap, relative to not knowing what’s said about you.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  What, you mean I could paid for reading and posting HN? Where do I sign up? The claim of a covert army of astrotufers / reputation management firms was silly when it was made back in the day on Slashdot and it's still silly today. If nothing else, it would never pay well enough for people to keep such a juicy secret.
- Kiro 7y ago
  I keep seeing you blame any downvote you get on external factors. To me it looks like you're just trying to find excuses and cannot accept that people may be downvoting you for legitimate reasons.
ogre_codes 7y ago
Is this story (which popped up on HN less than a week ago) better service? http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o... Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out. Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.
bigiain 7y ago
Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally. I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems. I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_. If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...
- deadbunny 7y ago
  Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope. I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
  - mantap 7y ago
    I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.
  - josteink 7y ago
    So if your monthly GCP-spending exceeds the salary of 2 engineers, you get access to at least 1. Sounds great!
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to. https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat
maxdo 7y ago
Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret
plandis 7y ago
Funny enough I just got an email from YoutubeTV last week basically saying the following: Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years). Great customer service :-/

by ximeng 7y ago

mzz80 7y ago

No one likes a poor customer experience. But businesses will always choose a poor customer experience over the risk of a business shutting down. That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.

__jal 7y ago
It took us about half a year to get billing set up with them. Completely pointless shit show that basically every other company on the planet manages, with Google's own unique weirdness about talking with icky customers. It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).

dragonsh 7y ago

Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples. I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.

harikb 7y ago
> Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing? I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  Same for Facebook. You cannot make any negative comments about react or other Fb tech
1MoreThing 7y ago
This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true. No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
- throwaway29303 7y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-pr-firm-google https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it. HN is no longer niche. > Who has the budget for this? Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens. Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
- topkai22 7y ago
  It's possible, but the reputation management people also worry a fair amount about getting caught astroturfing or running bot nets. There are a lot less risky ways of accomplishing the same goal- pushing positive stories, honestly responding, using SEP techniques to get ahead of negative news in search results, etc.
- Terretta 7y ago
  > Who has the budget for this? Every enterprise, basically. You subscribe to social media monitoring as a service, they monitor the fire hose and flip on the bat signal as needed. It’s dirt cheap, relative to not knowing what’s said about you.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
What, you mean I could paid for reading and posting HN? Where do I sign up? The claim of a covert army of astrotufers / reputation management firms was silly when it was made back in the day on Slashdot and it's still silly today. If nothing else, it would never pay well enough for people to keep such a juicy secret.
Kiro 7y ago
I keep seeing you blame any downvote you get on external factors. To me it looks like you're just trying to find excuses and cannot accept that people may be downvoting you for legitimate reasons.

ogre_codes 7y ago

Is this story (which popped up on HN less than a week ago) better service? http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o... Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out. Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.

bigiain 7y ago

Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally. I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems. I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_. If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...

deadbunny 7y ago
Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope. I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
- mantap 7y ago
  I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.
- josteink 7y ago
  So if your monthly GCP-spending exceeds the salary of 2 engineers, you get access to at least 1. Sounds great!
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to. https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat

maxdo 7y ago

Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret

plandis 7y ago

Funny enough I just got an email from YoutubeTV last week basically saying the following: Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years). Great customer service :-/