4 ms·

>Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the

>Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing. Don't forget the support. I used to work at a Series B startup, and AWS provided excellent support. We probably tossed them a few million a year, so I can only imagine what kind of white-glove top-tier support a big enterprise spender would've received. We got responses for anything ranging from general UI questions to highly-in-the-weeds Redshift technical questions within 1 business day. >90% of the time, the issue was resolved upon the first response. Google on the other hand, has very poor support. Facebook is by no means a support paragon either. For this reason alone, I see a Microsoft-Amazon cloud duopoly with anyone else being a minor player as the only outcome. When shit hits the fan (as it is now) you need enterprise support capabilities.

kenhwang 7y ago
We're owned by one of AWS's biggest clients and we get to straight up request features every other month and have their teams build it for us. We have a few humans assigned to our account that will physically come into our office when we have problems worth discussing. We also get access to quite a lot of price/billing advantages. Google we can't even get them to answer an email.
- eitally 7y ago
  But you're not one of googled biggest customers, so.... If you were, your experience night be very different.
  - kenhwang 7y ago
    We're smack on the frontpage of https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ Google is more important to our parent org than Amazon; Google is a strategic partner, Amazon is simply another tech vendor. We might be part of a 11-12 figure megacorp now, but Amazon hasn't treated us too differently from since we were a tiny startup with not much spend, and neither has Google.
    - anon102010 7y ago
      Yep - AWS even goes out of scope on support requests for smaller folks (they really shouldn't). Google "support" is horrendous. You cannot PAY to get them to help you. We were on google apps (a long time ago now) and there was some state issue with admin transitions - so you'd get stuck. 100's of begging comments from plenty of PAYING users about the issue on their forums. Calls got you zilch. Crickets. Finally 2 years later - oh, we noticed blah blah and this might work now. I would never trust anything critical to google. They literally will NOT take your money to help you - we'd have paid $10K to have someone press whatever damn button needed pressing.
      - kenhwang 7y ago
        I know GSuite is on a whole tier lower standard of support, but man do we have horror stories there. Here's a fun one: One of our engineers needed to send out a couple hundred individual emails to other people inside our company. So, being an engineer he automated it, wrote a little script to send the emails via SMTP. I guess some system within Gmail flagged it as suspicious behavior and froze our account. Oh hey, now no one in the company can send or receive email. Great. IT tries to contact support. They told him to send an email from our account to open a ticket. We can't send emails. Took several hours of phone tag to eventually reach a human who wasn't on a helpdesk flow chart. His response? Google can't/won't do anything just wait for the automated systems to eventually release the freeze in the next few days. So yeah, no company emails for the next day or so. Google thought that was a perfectly OK way to run an enterprise software service.
        anon102010 7y ago
        haha - this matches exactly my experience from above and a few other times! Glad I'm not the only one they crapped on despite being a paying customer. I'm playing with GCP but haven't had anyone actually deploy to it that I work with - let's be safe goes a long way to keep folks making decisions off google I've found. I like their search / email products though.
rossjudson 7y ago
Could you provide examples of "very poor support" from Google Cloud?
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  AWS support tended to be very sharp, understand the situation and workflow holistically, and occasionally provide additional information (i.e. they could understand what, as the customer, I _needed to know to resolve my issue_ rather than only answering _exactly what I asked_). Like I said, 90% or more of AWS support asks required no follow ups. Not the case for GCP. GCP support tended to give more generic or vague answers, or would simply "unblock you to the next blocker". As a support expert, you'd hope they understood the workflows, didn't seem to be the case. Google searches seem to indicate this isn't too uncommon amongst cloud platform users. GCP is the technically most sophisticated product, but my experience as a user was stability was far more comforting when fires broke out, as they will for any cloud vendor. As an aside, I once experienced a G Suite "circular lockout" issue where I had to request permissions from myself. I spent hours agonizing over fixing it, and never actually heard back on that issue at all from the support team. I'm sure GCP and GSuite are independent support teams, though. Note: I haven't used GCP in a bit over 12 months. Maybe things have changed since then, I don't know. But it certainly seemed that if you're a small company, they don't really care about you. I'd assume that GCP's large enterprise clients received excellent support.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    You must have a really big contract with AWS to have such a great experience with AWS support, or are still at the level of manually requesting limit increase tickets, or something. It seems like half the time AWS's tier-1 support sends the me a link to the documentation that I linked to in my ticket, the other half the time I spend hours, sometimes days of engineering time to get the logs they asked for, only for them to come back with "I talked with the product team and oh yeah that's a known issue". If I'm really lucky, I don't have to prove to them it's their fault that something's broken before they admit that there's a problem. Frustratingly, it's all covered under NDA, which is where things really get ugly, because you can't even really talk about it. I'm sure support is awesome if you're Netflix spending however many millions of dollars a month. Maybe at that level there's a secret site that straight up says product X has limitations Y and Z, but after having to prove to AWS that the problem is on their end, multiple times, their enterprise support is worthless. It's a good lever to push on in a contact though. I've never used GCP support so can't say anything about it.

kenhwang 7y ago

We're owned by one of AWS's biggest clients and we get to straight up request features every other month and have their teams build it for us. We have a few humans assigned to our account that will physically come into our office when we have problems worth discussing. We also get access to quite a lot of price/billing advantages. Google we can't even get them to answer an email.

eitally 7y ago
But you're not one of googled biggest customers, so.... If you were, your experience night be very different.
- kenhwang 7y ago
  We're smack on the frontpage of https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ Google is more important to our parent org than Amazon; Google is a strategic partner, Amazon is simply another tech vendor. We might be part of a 11-12 figure megacorp now, but Amazon hasn't treated us too differently from since we were a tiny startup with not much spend, and neither has Google.
  - anon102010 7y ago
    Yep - AWS even goes out of scope on support requests for smaller folks (they really shouldn't). Google "support" is horrendous. You cannot PAY to get them to help you. We were on google apps (a long time ago now) and there was some state issue with admin transitions - so you'd get stuck. 100's of begging comments from plenty of PAYING users about the issue on their forums. Calls got you zilch. Crickets. Finally 2 years later - oh, we noticed blah blah and this might work now. I would never trust anything critical to google. They literally will NOT take your money to help you - we'd have paid $10K to have someone press whatever damn button needed pressing.
    - kenhwang 7y ago
      I know GSuite is on a whole tier lower standard of support, but man do we have horror stories there. Here's a fun one: One of our engineers needed to send out a couple hundred individual emails to other people inside our company. So, being an engineer he automated it, wrote a little script to send the emails via SMTP. I guess some system within Gmail flagged it as suspicious behavior and froze our account. Oh hey, now no one in the company can send or receive email. Great. IT tries to contact support. They told him to send an email from our account to open a ticket. We can't send emails. Took several hours of phone tag to eventually reach a human who wasn't on a helpdesk flow chart. His response? Google can't/won't do anything just wait for the automated systems to eventually release the freeze in the next few days. So yeah, no company emails for the next day or so. Google thought that was a perfectly OK way to run an enterprise software service.
      - anon102010 7y ago
        haha - this matches exactly my experience from above and a few other times! Glad I'm not the only one they crapped on despite being a paying customer. I'm playing with GCP but haven't had anyone actually deploy to it that I work with - let's be safe goes a long way to keep folks making decisions off google I've found. I like their search / email products though.

rossjudson 7y ago

Could you provide examples of "very poor support" from Google Cloud?

oarabbus_ 7y ago
AWS support tended to be very sharp, understand the situation and workflow holistically, and occasionally provide additional information (i.e. they could understand what, as the customer, I _needed to know to resolve my issue_ rather than only answering _exactly what I asked_). Like I said, 90% or more of AWS support asks required no follow ups. Not the case for GCP. GCP support tended to give more generic or vague answers, or would simply "unblock you to the next blocker". As a support expert, you'd hope they understood the workflows, didn't seem to be the case. Google searches seem to indicate this isn't too uncommon amongst cloud platform users. GCP is the technically most sophisticated product, but my experience as a user was stability was far more comforting when fires broke out, as they will for any cloud vendor. As an aside, I once experienced a G Suite "circular lockout" issue where I had to request permissions from myself. I spent hours agonizing over fixing it, and never actually heard back on that issue at all from the support team. I'm sure GCP and GSuite are independent support teams, though. Note: I haven't used GCP in a bit over 12 months. Maybe things have changed since then, I don't know. But it certainly seemed that if you're a small company, they don't really care about you. I'd assume that GCP's large enterprise clients received excellent support.
- fragmede 7y ago
  You must have a really big contract with AWS to have such a great experience with AWS support, or are still at the level of manually requesting limit increase tickets, or something. It seems like half the time AWS's tier-1 support sends the me a link to the documentation that I linked to in my ticket, the other half the time I spend hours, sometimes days of engineering time to get the logs they asked for, only for them to come back with "I talked with the product team and oh yeah that's a known issue". If I'm really lucky, I don't have to prove to them it's their fault that something's broken before they admit that there's a problem. Frustratingly, it's all covered under NDA, which is where things really get ugly, because you can't even really talk about it. I'm sure support is awesome if you're Netflix spending however many millions of dollars a month. Maybe at that level there's a secret site that straight up says product X has limitations Y and Z, but after having to prove to AWS that the problem is on their end, multiple times, their enterprise support is worthless. It's a good lever to push on in a contact though. I've never used GCP support so can't say anything about it.