6 ms·

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing servic

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though. Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.

reacweb 7y ago
My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.
blinotz 7y ago
Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game. Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet. But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place. Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics. And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented. Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact. And that surely the complete opposite of customer service. Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA. And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.
- whatitdobooboo 7y ago
  I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly. It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.
  - test1235 7y ago
    I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.
    - lithos 7y ago
      Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.
      - whatitdobooboo 7y ago
        Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say. Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job
    - tim333 7y ago
      Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.
  - koningrobot 7y ago
    Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
  - lowdose 7y ago
    The difference between AWS and Gcloud is the ability to have a human conversation 1 click away. Shouldn't be that hard to replicate for Google.
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  I suspect a certain book retailer also didn't see the opportunuty in the first place.
Legogris 7y ago
Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.
- ethbro 7y ago
  That's because new products get promotions.
mcintyre1994 7y ago
From what I've heard their customer service for paid customers seems to be fine. No first hand experience though because I've also heard that if anything goes wrong they tend to shut down and ban all your Google accounts - that seems to be the main thing people here seem to warn about anyway. And when that happens there's no way you're going to get to talk to anyone who can help you.
koheripbal 7y ago
I believe the "reputation" is simply the fact that you cannot call someone at Google for support unless you're an enterprise customer (GSUITE). That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer. ...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams. The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The problem is companies that treat support as a cost center. A healthy company mines the hell out of it for feature discovery and product improvement. These people are literally continually talking to your customers about what their actual pain points are!
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    The problem is that that data is incredibly hard to mine.
dangus 7y ago
Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account? I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free. In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  $50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done. That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.
  - nkozyra 7y ago
    Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated. One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. No, I don't think there really is. With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.
- rat9988 7y ago
  You failed to read his point. He is talking about their reputation, not whatever-happens-in-practice.
taf2 7y ago
Yeah - I get this but when things are free, I no longer assume they'll stick around and I no longer hold it against the business closing the free service down. I think in the mid 2000s a lot of people saw free as a quick way to do land grabs or experiments and google especially. As a result there is this mis-conception of trust. To me it was growing up with the internet and learning that a business needs $$ to operate so anyone selling something for free that didn't have a clear monetization strategy was to be avoided. Sure study it and learn but never trust it for your own well being... my two cents
irrational 7y ago
We recently had to choose a cloud provider for a Fortune 150 company. Google was the first one thrown out - for this exact reason. We have absolutely no faith or trust in Google's ability to keep anything running or to provide any level of customer service.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Customer service doesn't scale, and it's sorking out OK for google so far.
goatherders 7y ago
We pay for GSUIte for our org, approximately $300/month across a number of domains. I find the included chat support to be excellent and often marvel at how wait times are always under 1 minute. Perhaps other GSuite users dont know that chat support exists?
rckoepke 7y ago
I've had really high quality support from GCP and a nice human touch when I accidentally ran up a $10,000 TPU bill on my own personal project. I emailed them, saying I don't actually have that kind of money, and they not only wiped the whole bill, they refunded all the money which had been charged to my debit card and already removed from my bank account. Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure. To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.
dimitar 7y ago
My experience with Azure match Google's reputation, and no, having an Enterprise Agreement with Azure doesn't help one bit, other than having an army of evangelists and partners chasing after you. I completely disregard any documentation or information older than 2019, and I'm a bit suspicious if it is from the first half of the year, that is how often they change things for no apparent reason. Their support will likely try to convince you to rewrite your app with their latest stack than solve obvious issues with Azure. The only positive thing about the whole ecosystem is that support and evangelists/presales will likely admit bugs and share workarounds they've used. For example deploying AKS from the portal has a 50% chance of failing because it will not have created the service principle before something else requires it - so they will recommend creating the service principal in advance and selecting it in the config.

reacweb 7y ago

My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.

blinotz 7y ago

Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game. Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet. But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place. Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics. And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented. Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact. And that surely the complete opposite of customer service. Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA. And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.

whatitdobooboo 7y ago
I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly. It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.
- test1235 7y ago
  I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.
  - lithos 7y ago
    Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.
    - whatitdobooboo 7y ago
      Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say. Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job
  - tim333 7y ago
    Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.
- koningrobot 7y ago
  Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- lowdose 7y ago
  The difference between AWS and Gcloud is the ability to have a human conversation 1 click away. Shouldn't be that hard to replicate for Google.
hyperpallium 7y ago
I suspect a certain book retailer also didn't see the opportunuty in the first place.

Legogris 7y ago

Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.

ethbro 7y ago
That's because new products get promotions.

mcintyre1994 7y ago

From what I've heard their customer service for paid customers seems to be fine. No first hand experience though because I've also heard that if anything goes wrong they tend to shut down and ban all your Google accounts - that seems to be the main thing people here seem to warn about anyway. And when that happens there's no way you're going to get to talk to anyone who can help you.

koheripbal 7y ago

I believe the "reputation" is simply the fact that you cannot call someone at Google for support unless you're an enterprise customer (GSUITE). That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer. ...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams. The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.

ethbro 7y ago
The problem is companies that treat support as a cost center. A healthy company mines the hell out of it for feature discovery and product improvement. These people are literally continually talking to your customers about what their actual pain points are!
- koheripbal 7y ago
  The problem is that that data is incredibly hard to mine.

dangus 7y ago

Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account? I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free. In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.

ceejayoz 7y ago
$50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done. That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.
- nkozyra 7y ago
  Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated. One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. No, I don't think there really is. With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.
rat9988 7y ago
You failed to read his point. He is talking about their reputation, not whatever-happens-in-practice.

taf2 7y ago

Yeah - I get this but when things are free, I no longer assume they'll stick around and I no longer hold it against the business closing the free service down. I think in the mid 2000s a lot of people saw free as a quick way to do land grabs or experiments and google especially. As a result there is this mis-conception of trust. To me it was growing up with the internet and learning that a business needs $$ to operate so anyone selling something for free that didn't have a clear monetization strategy was to be avoided. Sure study it and learn but never trust it for your own well being... my two cents

irrational 7y ago

We recently had to choose a cloud provider for a Fortune 150 company. Google was the first one thrown out - for this exact reason. We have absolutely no faith or trust in Google's ability to keep anything running or to provide any level of customer service.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Customer service doesn't scale, and it's sorking out OK for google so far.

goatherders 7y ago

We pay for GSUIte for our org, approximately $300/month across a number of domains. I find the included chat support to be excellent and often marvel at how wait times are always under 1 minute. Perhaps other GSuite users dont know that chat support exists?

rckoepke 7y ago

I've had really high quality support from GCP and a nice human touch when I accidentally ran up a $10,000 TPU bill on my own personal project. I emailed them, saying I don't actually have that kind of money, and they not only wiped the whole bill, they refunded all the money which had been charged to my debit card and already removed from my bank account. Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure. To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.

dimitar 7y ago

My experience with Azure match Google's reputation, and no, having an Enterprise Agreement with Azure doesn't help one bit, other than having an army of evangelists and partners chasing after you. I completely disregard any documentation or information older than 2019, and I'm a bit suspicious if it is from the first half of the year, that is how often they change things for no apparent reason. Their support will likely try to convince you to rewrite your app with their latest stack than solve obvious issues with Azure. The only positive thing about the whole ecosystem is that support and evangelists/presales will likely admit bugs and share workarounds they've used. For example deploying AKS from the portal has a 50% chance of failing because it will not have created the service principle before something else requires it - so they will recommend creating the service principal in advance and selecting it in the config.