What you are describing unfortunately is due to the external vendor teams managing support -- a business decision as you rightly mentioned. A lot of support be

What you are describing unfortunately is due to the external vendor teams managing support -- a business decision as you rightly mentioned. A lot of support became outsourced and the original support team became more of a tier 3 backline support with the first 2 tiers being handled by vendors. This started for GCP just after I left in mid 2013. The vendors responsible for support have contracts to meet certain customer satisfaction metrics and time to first response metrics (based on customer tier and ticket priority). The majority of inbound support cases would get auto assigned to the vendor team. Only the top customers would reach Google employees directly. The vendor and their staff simply have no incentive to troubleshoot an unusual issue - they also cannot have access to the tools that may expedite such troubleshooting. It's all about pattern recognition to quickly resolve a ticket. As many vendors were overeager to escalate support cases to the Googlers it became necessary to impose more requirements on the vendor team to be able to escalate an issue - invalid escalations were being tracked and the vendor would be penalized for the total of these. I built the internal tool via which GSuite and GCP outages or significant issues would be managed from a support perspective. This had the advantage that vendors didn't need to waste their time (poorly) parroting (with a delay) the status of an outage as related incidents could be (manually) grouped together and then all be updated at once by the current incident manager on the support team - freeing up lots of support folks to work on other support cases. I definitely agree this vendor-based support model is a frustrating experience for everyone involved. I witnessed that myself after leaving Google. By the way, I'm very surprised GCP tries to upsell you on consulting services based on your support interactions. Running a support organization for a very technical product with so many unknowns and variables at scale is hard. I wonder who does that well and how they accomplish it (from an operational perspective). I have no idea how AWS manages support internally. I work at Azure - until last week as a Developer Advocate, now as a software engineer in Azure CTO incubations - I have no idea how our support organization is run or what their quality is. However, from what I hear Azure support is eager to help anyone and everyone. I remember being very confused I got a phone call to inquire whether I needed help within a day or two of signing up for an Azure free trial.