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Google has a real trust issue with me that's twofold. One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at t

Google has a real trust issue with me that's twofold. One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will abandon anything they launch. Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and just ended up tricking it through trial and error.

tsycho 7y ago
Google absolutely needs to fix their trust problem, but it is also completely wrong to compare support between their paid GCP customers vs their mostly free Android app developers. Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly, AND they were able to resolve my problem and issue a refund. So maybe they are improving on that end too.
- tw04 7y ago
  >vs their mostly free Android app developers. But why? Per OP - they'd be willing to pay for an enterprise support contract. Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE? It's one thing to tell people using a free service that their only option is automated support - it's quite another to tell customers you just flat-out refuse to offer a paid support model. That tells me that you are organizationally deficient at providing customer support. I've yet to hear anyone using paid g suite speak praises about their support experience if they ever have issues. Quite the opposite.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    > Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE? Well, for one thing, everyone you ask except apparently the HN comment section will tell you. I've probably seen this exact conversation play out 10+ times now. Someone says that GCP has poor customer support by analogy to other, mostly free services. Someone who actually uses GCP customer support claims that this is not the case. Some third (or perhaps the original) person blows them off and insists that Google's behavior toward the statistically adversarial and free users of other services must be representative of Google's behavior toward an entirely different group of users. It's baffling.
    - Jasper_ 7y ago
      The point is not that it must be, the point is that if you've burned your bridges once before, you're going to have a hard time selling again. If I've been screwed once by Google (and I have been, multiple times), selling me GCP has to overcome those trust issues. Not to mention that I have had rocky issues with GCP as well. There was documentation that lied about its caching behavior, cost me over $1000 of my personal money, they took over a year to fix the bug and offered no reimbursement. Maybe I'm a small fry and don't deserve support, but this is the kind of customer management that Google is absolutely terrible at.
    - tonystubblebine 7y ago
      To give you the depth of my misgiving here, I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider. Maybe they won't kill GCP, but I could easily see them gradually lowering their focus until I would regret having built anything on it. It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition. So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last. I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  Google Ads and GSuite, which are paid products, have terrible customer support in my experience. Maybe our account was not big enough? With AWS, just the opposite: knowledgeable and fast. Was even able to put in feature requests.
- Chyzwar 7y ago
  Free Android app developers Google takes 30% on android app sales. I do not see it as free.
  - conductr 7y ago
    I’ve never launched an app. If you integrate directly with stripe do you still have to pay 30% to google?
    - discordance 7y ago
      Both the App Store and Play have restrictions on taking payment in-app if you don't use their payment API
    - ativzzz 7y ago
      It depends on your app, see https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/ https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/
    - akiselev 7y ago
      That's against the developer TOS for both major app stores, although enforcement is lax in the Google store.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  >> Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly You just described their problem. You pay them money, whatever they ask, and are shocked that e human provided support to you
- jackmodern 7y ago
  I work at Lyft and have to work directly with Google on several of their various enterprise offerings. Their support is downright AWFUL. Getting someone from Google to help is so challenging that they have decided that in order to work with them on their enterprise offerings you must go through a 3rd party vendor. Their third party vendors are all small companies with which my organization has very little trust for. I will never knowingly try to do anything with Google again after the hellish experience I have had dealing with them and their vendors so far, it just isn't worth it.
- fooster 7y ago
  Google payed support for GCE is absolutely embarrassingly terrible. To get to someone who knows what they are talking about you have to go through many many people who have zero clue, over frustrating course of many days. Every.single.time. We're not going to be the biggest fish, but our spend is approaching $1mio per year. If you spend more than that and have a TAM YMMV.
rodgerd 7y ago
It's interesting that they've chosen to bring in someone from Oracle to fix these problems.
- fragmede 7y ago
  Where GP claims that Google "doesn't have the sales team nor the experience in building one", it seems like an Oracle exec would be a perfect fit, because for all the hate levied against Oracle, for all sorts of reasons, it seems like enterprise sales is something they're quite good at.
ghayes 7y ago
Neither of these concerns affect Google Cloud Platform. 1) Google has not cancelled any GCP product that I know of, and 2) GCP has excellent support with fast SLA-timed responses from support personnel. Additionally, Google, the org., recently decided to redouble efforts to grow GCP.
- robk 7y ago
  People can't separate this out
- jedberg 7y ago
  It doesn't matter though. Until they fix their product trust issues for the rest of their business, people will always conflate them.
  - rossjudson 7y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but it can be frustrating at times. "I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".
    - jlawer 7y ago
      Sure, but when I got a counterfeit product on amazon I called them and got it fixed quickly and relatively painlessly.
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      > "I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS". This is actually a good argument. I can easily imagine that this could become a problem for Amazon in the future.
      - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        It's not just "I bought a counterfeit item on Amazon".. But instead: "Amazon continues to allow counterfeits to pervade. I cannot trust them with anything important."
Traster 7y ago
>They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. You've really hit the nail on the head for me there. The people I really respect are the people who can look at idea a and say "that's failing because it's a bad idea" and look at idea b and say "that's a good idea, but we need to work harder at it". Google (from the outside) appears to say "These are all ideas, and they failed, kill them". There's no understanding or insight into the world, there's only 'experiments', which is as good as throwing a random number generator at an authentication system.
- tonystubblebine 7y ago
  Thank you.

tsycho 7y ago

Google absolutely needs to fix their trust problem, but it is also completely wrong to compare support between their paid GCP customers vs their mostly free Android app developers. Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly, AND they were able to resolve my problem and issue a refund. So maybe they are improving on that end too.

tw04 7y ago
>vs their mostly free Android app developers. But why? Per OP - they'd be willing to pay for an enterprise support contract. Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE? It's one thing to tell people using a free service that their only option is automated support - it's quite another to tell customers you just flat-out refuse to offer a paid support model. That tells me that you are organizationally deficient at providing customer support. I've yet to hear anyone using paid g suite speak praises about their support experience if they ever have issues. Quite the opposite.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  > Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE? Well, for one thing, everyone you ask except apparently the HN comment section will tell you. I've probably seen this exact conversation play out 10+ times now. Someone says that GCP has poor customer support by analogy to other, mostly free services. Someone who actually uses GCP customer support claims that this is not the case. Some third (or perhaps the original) person blows them off and insists that Google's behavior toward the statistically adversarial and free users of other services must be representative of Google's behavior toward an entirely different group of users. It's baffling.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    The point is not that it must be, the point is that if you've burned your bridges once before, you're going to have a hard time selling again. If I've been screwed once by Google (and I have been, multiple times), selling me GCP has to overcome those trust issues. Not to mention that I have had rocky issues with GCP as well. There was documentation that lied about its caching behavior, cost me over $1000 of my personal money, they took over a year to fix the bug and offered no reimbursement. Maybe I'm a small fry and don't deserve support, but this is the kind of customer management that Google is absolutely terrible at.
  - tonystubblebine 7y ago
    To give you the depth of my misgiving here, I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider. Maybe they won't kill GCP, but I could easily see them gradually lowering their focus until I would regret having built anything on it. It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition. So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last. I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
aledalgrande 7y ago
Google Ads and GSuite, which are paid products, have terrible customer support in my experience. Maybe our account was not big enough? With AWS, just the opposite: knowledgeable and fast. Was even able to put in feature requests.
Chyzwar 7y ago
Free Android app developers Google takes 30% on android app sales. I do not see it as free.
- conductr 7y ago
  I’ve never launched an app. If you integrate directly with stripe do you still have to pay 30% to google?
  - discordance 7y ago
    Both the App Store and Play have restrictions on taking payment in-app if you don't use their payment API
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    It depends on your app, see https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/ https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/payments/
  - akiselev 7y ago
    That's against the developer TOS for both major app stores, although enforcement is lax in the Google store.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>> Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly You just described their problem. You pay them money, whatever they ask, and are shocked that e human provided support to you
jackmodern 7y ago
I work at Lyft and have to work directly with Google on several of their various enterprise offerings. Their support is downright AWFUL. Getting someone from Google to help is so challenging that they have decided that in order to work with them on their enterprise offerings you must go through a 3rd party vendor. Their third party vendors are all small companies with which my organization has very little trust for. I will never knowingly try to do anything with Google again after the hellish experience I have had dealing with them and their vendors so far, it just isn't worth it.
fooster 7y ago
Google payed support for GCE is absolutely embarrassingly terrible. To get to someone who knows what they are talking about you have to go through many many people who have zero clue, over frustrating course of many days. Every.single.time. We're not going to be the biggest fish, but our spend is approaching $1mio per year. If you spend more than that and have a TAM YMMV.

rodgerd 7y ago

It's interesting that they've chosen to bring in someone from Oracle to fix these problems.

fragmede 7y ago
Where GP claims that Google "doesn't have the sales team nor the experience in building one", it seems like an Oracle exec would be a perfect fit, because for all the hate levied against Oracle, for all sorts of reasons, it seems like enterprise sales is something they're quite good at.

ghayes 7y ago

Neither of these concerns affect Google Cloud Platform. 1) Google has not cancelled any GCP product that I know of, and 2) GCP has excellent support with fast SLA-timed responses from support personnel. Additionally, Google, the org., recently decided to redouble efforts to grow GCP.

robk 7y ago
People can't separate this out
jedberg 7y ago
It doesn't matter though. Until they fix their product trust issues for the rest of their business, people will always conflate them.
- rossjudson 7y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but it can be frustrating at times. "I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".
  - jlawer 7y ago
    Sure, but when I got a counterfeit product on amazon I called them and got it fixed quickly and relatively painlessly.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > "I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS". This is actually a good argument. I can easily imagine that this could become a problem for Amazon in the future.
    - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      It's not just "I bought a counterfeit item on Amazon".. But instead: "Amazon continues to allow counterfeits to pervade. I cannot trust them with anything important."

Traster 7y ago

>They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. You've really hit the nail on the head for me there. The people I really respect are the people who can look at idea a and say "that's failing because it's a bad idea" and look at idea b and say "that's a good idea, but we need to work harder at it". Google (from the outside) appears to say "These are all ideas, and they failed, kill them". There's no understanding or insight into the world, there's only 'experiments', which is as good as throwing a random number generator at an authentication system.

tonystubblebine 7y ago
Thank you.