16 ms·

I'm tired of Google's business products

221 points by sqlpipe 4y ago

I've been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google's suite of products. Google Ads for marketing, Google workspace for email, Drive for spreadsheets... The works. While working for other companies, I never really had a problem with their services. In fact, Google remains one of my favorite companies of all time for solving the search problem (their search engine is still the best, sorry haters). However, over the past few months, I have STRUGGLED against the tide to use their other services. My Google ads account is currently suspended for reasons I cannot fathom. My Google Sheets spreadsheet is currently frozen (the reason I'm ranting right now). Their administrative setting pages feel like going to the DMV from the amount of options on screen. Last but not least, their support is almost nonexistent. Am I alone in this? Is this a problem of my own making, by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly? Or is this a feeling that others get? Conclusion: I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off. Edit: Shameless plug, my company peddles a data movement tool called SQLpipe. https://sqlpipe.com

AnotherRando 4y ago
I'd prescribe libreoffice and nextcloud to your affliction, but my approach will be downvoted into oblivion for a myriad of Reasons™
PaulHoule 4y ago
Google docs is a joke.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Huh?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs. I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease. Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite. I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way. *I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier to use word for compatibility with someone else--but for the most part I much prefer using Google day-to-day.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers. There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults. There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 in floating point numbers (hint: none of those numbers actually exist in the floating point number system, when you ask for 0.1 you get a different number that happens to print out as '0.1') There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it. However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.
        wesnerm2 4y ago
        Former Excel developer here. In Excel 97, the difference between the values needed to be less than 1e-16 times the magnitudes of the operands to be considered equal. It makes sense since such a small proportion is unlikely to occur by chance through arithmetic without the values being "equal" in the original base.
        InflexHQ 4y ago
  - The_rationalist 4y ago
jqpabc123 4y ago
Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives. Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
  Thank you for saying that. We will have to band together and fight against Google. I think we should have a separate category on HN to expose Google's evil doings.
- ford 4y ago
  Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? I struggle to make the connection between those kinds of business apps and advertising. Perhaps they get some usage data of how/when people work? I do believe much of what Google does (i.e. chrome) is to benefit their ads business, but I think it's a bit cynical to think that's true of every product they have. FWIW I've worked at companies that use both Microsoft + Google suites (mostly drive + calendar + mail) and generally preferred Google's. I did not have any issues like the post mentions.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    >Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? It literally says in gdrive tos that they read the docs, yes they do . "Our automated systems analyse your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, and spam and malware detection,"
    - AlanYx 4y ago
      They actually removed the statement that you're quoting from the current version of the Google Drive terms of service. (The old version you're quoting is still available online, but it's under an "/archive" URL.) That being said, I've read through all the Google Terms of Service online, and I can't actually figure out whether they still use Google Drive content for customized search results.
mikece 4y ago
Makes me think of a question I've pondered but to which I don't have an answer: is there a way to use Libre Office synched through cloud storage such that multiple people can work on different parts of the same document at the same time and see each other's changes?
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  There is a Libreoffice "cloud" project, but I'm not sure how stable and reliable it is. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
- doubled112 4y ago
  Nextcloud with Collabora CODE has worked pretty well for me, but please keep in mind I'm only using it at home. They offer a more enterprise option, I believe. CODE is more the development track.
  - trelane 4y ago
    Collabora is also a major LibreOffice developer. They're pretty great from about all standpoints.
endisneigh 4y ago
dear diary... In any case, Google has plenty of competition in the areas you're talking about. Try the Office suite + Microsoft Ads.
- troymc 4y ago
  I agree. Other options are Zoho [1] and ONLYOFFICE [2]. [1] https://www.zoho.com/ https://www.zoho.com/ [2] https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/
- arkitaip 4y ago
  Microsoft Office+Outlook+Teams is some of the worst software I've recently used. Poorly designed and poorly integrated with tons of overlapping functionality cracks where productivity goes to die.
dariusj18 4y ago
I decided I wanted to start a blog and run ads on it, created a google ads account and was immediately blocked with no means of redress or support, only automated "tough luck" replies.
- sqlpipe 4y ago
  Me too! Upon appeal, they emailed me back saying "we can confirm your account isn't suspended"... It's like what are you talking about? I'm looking right at a big red banner saying my account is suspended! My hopes are not high for a fast resolution.
mountainriver 4y ago
Yeah they have edges and the support is bad, but they still kind of hit a sweet spot of good ux and features all tied into the google account you probably already use for mail/search. I think we will see more competitors in this space though. Google isn’t investing enough into it and there is opportunity.
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  I think its kinda funny that Office is so ubiquitous that everyone forgets how the productivity software market is like. Microsoft has 90% of it, so credit to Google for taking on the incumbent. It will be insanely hard for any challenger to dislodge MS from a company with thousands of employees, let alone build multiple products to beat all of the ones bundled in Office. The moat is large, like taking on Google themselves in search/ads
probably_wrong 4y ago
> Is this a problem of my own making (...)? Or is this a feeling that others get? I can understand why you "had" to rely on Google Ads. But in my opinion choosing Google Workspace/Drive falls unfortunately under "problem of your own making". None of the problems you describe is new nor unknown, and there are plenty of products that are just as good. > I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off. I think that that's the issue: maybe not in ads, but there is competition for everything else.
- jatins 4y ago
  > and there are plenty of products that are just as good. Other than MS Office, what's a good suite providing all of shared docs, spreadsheets, email, and a cloud drive?
  - warrenm 4y ago
    If you're in the Apple ecosystem, file sharing through iCloud and the Apple quite of apps is pretty good (not quite as good as O365, but worlds better than Google Docs)
    - booi 4y ago
      I have to disagree here. iCloud file sharing is atrociously bad. I share a fairly minimal amount of files with another apple account and there's constant sync issues, it's not anywhere near realtime or even "soon". Shared files and folders routinely never show up in iCloud drive even when they appear on the web interface. Restarts seem to be required to fix problems as they arise.
      - warrenm 4y ago
        I've had nary an issue in the last several eyars since first trying it ... guess this may be a ymmv situation?
stefanve 4y ago
I worked a lot with both MS online offerings and google's. My own money go's to MS when it comes to documents etc . It is better than the offering of google especially if you need a bit more the the basics. Support is also better. I don't thing that google office suit is bad just that MS is better That being said I'm contamplating to stop with MS as I have less needs for a good office suit and just use what apple offers
josefresco 4y ago
Google Analytics Google Ads Google Workspace All terrible experiences with overly complex UIs and a nightmare to use for small biz.
taylodl 4y ago
* > I've been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google's suite of products.* Just a reminder, most businesses fail - so doing what many people do is not necessarily the best thing to do. Having said that, it's rather foolish to have your business depend on Google. They have repeatedly demonstrated they're not good business partners and the main thrust of their business isn't in providing products and services for businesses. They don't support their services, they'll drop them at a moment's notice without any regard to the impacts to your business, and there's no way to get ahold of a human being when things inevitably go sour. Why do you want to partner with someone like that? I bash on the technical merits of Windows all day long but one thing Microsoft has done well over its nearly 50 year history is serving the needs of business. It's in their DNA. Office 365 is a very capable, and supported, platform. Nice thing is you can run it on a Mac too!
- Cordivae 4y ago
  Exactly. They make major decisions, give you less than 3 months to completely change things you depend on. And you can't even get someone on the phone (or even email for god-sake) to complain to.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Sorry, but as a user, Office 365 is a nightmare to use. Outlook on Mac can’t even do in-line email quotes. Sharing documents in your org is done via SharePoint(tm), the greatest nightmare on the planet. Don’t get me started on MS teams. Google products are much better from a UX perspective imho.
  - version_five 4y ago
    I think it's just a matter of opinion. I've used both O365 and GSuite extensively at different jobs, and after the initial switch, they are not too different, each has their annoyances, but I don't see a major change in productivity or quality of output between the two. In my business I like the option of sharing a .docx or .pptx and not having to ask a client to use google docs to view stuff. But when I had google docs, I made it work. I agree with the root comment that MS is much more business oriented though. At the end of the day, Google's "products" are still just a ruse to sell ads, so they don't have the institutional focus on solving business problems that MS has (not that MS is in any way perfect)
Cordivae 4y ago
I hate Google Workspace so much. Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users. I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable. All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google. I'm a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won't even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  >All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. Who owns the domain here? I use a custom domain with Gmail Workspaces, but I own the domain, and therefore control the MX records. The only thing I'd lose in a switch is stored email messages, but there are ways to download those.
  - Cordivae 4y ago
    Yes. I own the domains. And if they go through with this I will move and leave Google's ecosystem entirely. It will be a huge pain in the ass trying to do it for my grandparents though.
    - fatnoah 4y ago
      Gotcha. Yeah, IT for the parents & grandparents is definitely a challenge for things like this.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        It's a challenge for everybody. Having to put people who aren't computer savvy through it is just a reminder of what a pain in the ass it is... The fact that we can self-service doesn't make it less of an annoyance than we have to do something. And at this point, the pattern is clear. Google Business products are free until they are not. Building them into your infrastructure is taking on technical debt that you will have to pay down in the future, either by actually buying the product when they decide it is no longer free or by switching to an alternative. I still run into websites with a big API disabled rectangle where their Google maps integration used to be.
T3RMINATED 4y ago
salawat 4y ago
Google's stuff is barely hastily patched together, hard to reason through crap. It works, don't get me wrong. But I'm helping a family member start a business on the tech front, and most of their offerings are opaque to her. Built by tech people to be used by tech people, without the benefit of good, solid, onramp documentation, tooling, and user hostile offering design. Example: don't even try to admin Drive with anything less than business Standard, despite the fact centralized file handling is most useful to those with lower data quotas. The sharing is a mess. And I was horrified that most searches for Google drive administration were either docs that tried to sell you on drive, or internet public drives of individual users who just left stuff out there with personal information in it waiting to get reaped. At this point, it really frightens me what Google is trying to normalize in computing.
Kalanos 4y ago
And there is no way to provide feedback!
FlyNestor 4y ago
The advantage of dealing with small businesses in tech is that they are not huge cold monsters.
pocketsand 4y ago
I created a small ad campaign to advertise a side project. The projects makes no money, has no plan for monetization, does not use passwords. The only personal data it collects is an email address. I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected. I have occasionally tried to resubmit the appeal, but it says "please wait 3-5 business days before submitting a new appeal." I wait more than that and get the same message. I've called Google to try to talk to them. However, once it asks for my contact information, it tells me that they cannot talk to me because my account is suspended. It's a circular nightmare. I currently do not needs ads so it's not a hardship. But it is extremely frustrating. EDIT: One irony is that it is the same card I use to pay for my other Google services, linked through the same payment backend. They have no issue charging that card for my other services. But for Ads, it's suspicious. Who knows.
- sqlpipe 4y ago
  "I've called Google to try to talk to them"... Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"
  - pocketsand 4y ago
    To their credit, the automated system told me I was banned and couldn't talk to anyone until I got unbanned, so I never got anyone on the phone.
    - zelphirkalt 4y ago
      Sounds like a good ol' curfew pass A38.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Sounds like someone forgot to fill out the form twenty seven B stroke 6.
mcs_ 4y ago
> their search engine is still the best, sorry haters Naming or using the "hater" word in the sentence does not make us in the right side of the story. Considering users of other search engines as Haters does not sound right. You think is the best, fine. Recently today, in this network, there is an analysis about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229
- huffer 4y ago
  as far as I understood it, it was a tongue-in-cheek, a joke... or are you trolling too (in which case joke's on me :D)?
  - mcs_ 4y ago
    You got me...
    - huffer 4y ago
      yeah.. these days you really can't tell; every opinion, its counter-opinion, its meta-counter, its sarcastic spin, its trolling version, its counter-trolling, meta-counter-trolling versions.. everything (in the absence of body language cues etc.) is equally likely, which if I recall correctly is the definition of maximal entropy of information, i.e. random noise
dep_b 4y ago
Microsoft has actual customer service Just don't touch Teams and you'll be OK.
- warrenm 4y ago
  I never understand the hate Teams gets on HN - I use it more-or-less all day in both $WORK and $CUSTOMER environments ... rarely have more than a momentary hiccup in file sharing, screen sharing, group calls, chats, task tracking ...
  - dep_b 4y ago
    Mac user here: - It forces the discrete GPU for no apparent reason - I cannot be in multiple teams, which is terrible to freelancers - It has no AppleScript support compared to the excellent support of all other office apps, nor System Events - Having connectivity issues with calls where Hangouts (or whatever it's called nowadays) just works fine
    - warrenm 4y ago
      Never noticed the GPU issue (running an M1 MacBook Pro) I'm in multiple Teams by being on $WORK on my laptop and in a VDI instance for $CUSTOMER Honestly: never had a use for AppleScript ...haven't found anything I've wanted to automate on my Macs for the last decades The calls issue is the only thing that's ever a hiccup ... and it's rare (and when it does hiccup, it's on my end (ie Zoom doesn't work either)
gumby 4y ago
Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, the marketing plan for a major public company often mentioned on HN, and other documents clearly accidentally stored/shared with this group.
- thisiscorrect 4y ago
  I'm not making the trip. It sounds like you're saying users are moving files to the the wrong folders on their computers and the desktop tool respects that. What should the software do differently?
  - huffer 4y ago
    I guess the idea was that it's very confusing for non-technical people, and very easy to misplace.. (sorry if your message was accompanied by an "/s" -- I didn't see any)
- ghaff 4y ago
  I can usually find the docs I've created pretty easily--but then I'm pretty good about sensibly filing things. But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.
  - gumby 4y ago
    And docs shared with me can’t be moved into my filesystem
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Whether you can make a snapshot copy depends on permissions I think. But, yes, what I'd really like to do in many cases is to basically create a symlink to documents I know I'll be referencing/working with somewhere that they aren't mixed in with all the shared meeting presentations and the like I'll never look at again.
akselmo 4y ago
I would never use google for my business. I would rather self host it, especially with a small team or solo.
Saphyel 4y ago
I have used everything from google (as a typical user and as dev using their GCP) and everything they do "works" I feel like they do something messy and that's it. Kind of let's throw products and the client will figure out and if it isn't successful or we lose our main team we shut down the product.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Just go 100% Linux with the LibreOffice suite and if the business takes off, kick down a sizable donation.
IYasha 4y ago
You're not alone.
goopthink 4y ago
I completely agree - this is nearly verbatim a personal frustration I recorded in my work log from a few days ago: Extremely frustrated with Google Shopping ads. I can’t understand how they make money. Spent an hour trying to figure out how to: - Add custom UTM parameters (can’t unless with a manual feed, it looks like) because Google doesn’t doesn’t seem to track shopping ads unless you install extra JS events and modify google analytics - Change search queries that products come up for (after deeper research, look like you can’t - again, handled by the data feed but your product title must be now SEO’d to all heck to hit the right keywords. Good luck if you have an original product name) - Fix the product disapprovals (their bot was too dumb to understand how to navigate native shopify variants, it keeps seeing a mismatch between a variant and its price… and this is the data feed that Googles own app in Shopify generates!) - Understand why the shopping ads dashboard in Google and the in-Shopify google shopping ads dashboard show different product disapprovals... just why? Genuinely confused here. It’s ridiculous. It wasn’t this hard a few years ago. In the quest to add more ‘automation’ and ‘smartness’ they’ve made it so dumb and so bad it drives me up the wall. It reminds me of the time when a friend tried to do Google’s recommendations for “smart” ads and it optimized his local North Carolina health store ads to ads for dieticians targetting neighboring states, because of a few logical algorithmic leaps of “well this is what other users see success with, with ads like yours.” He wasted a few hundred dollars and time fielding confused calls, until we reverted the campaign, turned all the recommendations off and made it a simple, dumb but effective campaign. What a joke. A horribly infuriating joke played by a group of product managers and engineers. They are literally leaving so much money on the table because the platform is so unusable (speaking for experience: I regularly have people turn to me asking for help setting up their ads because they can’t make heads or tails of it).
rpastuszak 4y ago
> by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly I use Chrome for work and Safari as my personal browser and the amount of FUD created by Google is almost hilarious. In 90% of cases it's just a small glitch (e.g. a piece of UI looking a bit shitty on Safari), but in the remaining 10%... I get spiking CPU usage to the point where I could start frying eggs on my MacBook. I still prefer my browser being occasionally sluggish when using Google services to the ad-infested cesspool my parents' Chrome is. OK, my Safari can get a bit slow when using Gmail, but at least I'm not browsing the web through a storefront.
delgaudm 4y ago
You might take a look at the Zoho One suite, my experience with Zoho has been great as a small biz, and you definitely get a human when you need support, they are very responsive and helpful. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.
- sqlpipe 4y ago
  I love Zoho! Used it on another project, and will certainly use it going forward.
asiachick 4y ago
are you playing for google apps/gsuite for a custom domain? I have had no trouble getting live support that way. Ymmv
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Observe HN posts for a while. You will notice, that whenever Goolge and their support comes up, comments are rich with experiences/anecdotes of people, who have been stonewalled by Google. Their support is non-existent. Having proper support would cost them lots of money. Same for their other big disservices like YouTube. How many people have been banned for non-sensical reasons and tried to appeal. It has become something of a common knowledge, that there is basically no support worth mentioning, at least in the tech circles. Oh and don't think for a second, that using MS' alternative web products (Office 365) is much better. You pay for the probably buggiest office experience on the planet.
- ilamont 4y ago
  I can confirm Microsoft ads (Bing ads or whatever they're called) are even worse. We shut off an underperforming campaign and they were automatically restarted, repeatedly, until we disabled the entire account.
- blip54321 4y ago
  It's better. I hate Office 365 usability with a passion, and I hate the bugs, but it's much better than periodically having a fire as Google burns your business to the ground. Microsoft deals with businesses, and it works.
fsflover 4y ago
> Am I alone in this? No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057
allisdust 4y ago
I have been trying to increase the quotas they set on my gcp account and the whole thing has been an absolute madness : 1) Try increasing number of nodes - > fails with some cryptic message saying number of in use addresses is hitting the quota limit. 2) Search through their absolutely garbage console to go to the exact page which has the quotas. Try editing - > See a tooltip (not even an error message just a tooltip) saying I can't do it my self and has to contact their support. 3) Contact their billing support and ask for quota increase. After taking all the details they redirect me to their sales support. 4) Contact their sales support and its like dealing with second hand car sales people. Even after clearly stating that I'm an existing customer, they want a complete biography of my whole business, its needs and everything else. At the end they say they don't have anyway to actually raise the quote increase request from their side. 5) They have helpfully assigned me a relationship manager for further 'assisting' me with evaluating their products and that I got a meeting request for next week to discuss our 'needs'. Absolute garbage company with third rate support and sales people. And I can say that with confidence because I had the exact opposite experience with Linode when trying to raise limits on my account. Got a human to both respond and increase the limit almost immediately and I didn't need to provide any details about my business. I'm with OP - Google products are absolute trash.
- notreallyserio 4y ago
  It's funny they manage to have resource quotas but folks around here claim they couldn't possibly add spend quotas.
franczesko 4y ago
> their support is almost nonexistent #1 reason why I will never use GCP. With regards to their advertising services, last year their support took a grotesk turn - or account managers told us, that we have to create tickets to get help (which in fact mitigates the need of having account managers in the first place)
_jal 4y ago
One aspect of building a business is resilience: What happens when things break? Because things break. I personally would not use Google business products for a startup. They're fine for established shops where when Google fucks up your account, they 'know' who you are. If you're a small-$ nobody, the support policy is "sucks to be you". But everyone has different risk tolerances and fond feelings for certain companies. More important than that choice is to ask, "what do I do when Google/whoever breaks, or I have to generate a quote and the connectivity is down", and so on. Speaking of which, is Atlasssian still rebuilding?
dezb 4y ago
move to zoho.com FFS
milesward 4y ago
We help with this, it can be easier. Miles@sada.com As good as their products are, setup and config and ops are invariably too pesky, so we train experts to know how to efficiently navigate.
lordnacho 4y ago
> their support is almost nonexistent This is the critical bit. If you're happy with a vanilla product where you essentially search for how to access every feature ("how do I make a pivot table?"), Google Suite is for you. I use it for just low-value bags of documents, nothing critical in it at all. I never have a need for special features, and anything I do need I'm confident is actually there because I only use spreadsheets for totally vanilla stuff. I also don't depend on anything being available, so I avoid the pain every time there's an outage. I think for that kind of service, a few bucks a month is about right. For anything that needs a higher level of service, you don't really want to rely on a business whose strategy revolves around minimal customer interaction.
tome 4y ago
1. Nerd snipe Hacker News, for example with a story about how Google's services are declining in quality 2. Link to your company website 3. Better marketing than your allegedly suspended AdWords account!
beej71 4y ago
The primary reason I don't use Adsense is the risk that I'll be locked out of my Google account for unknown reasons. I've heard the same advice here on HN: if you're using Google tools for anything, do not use Adsense.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  This is something that has worried me somewhat as well. Is there any sort of workaround? Can you use a burner Google account for it?
WYepQ4dNnG 4y ago
"Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue." Most of their money comes from Ads, they couldn't give two crap about all other services, including cloud. And that's why they keep launching and discontinuing products.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
My company (~30 people, healthcare field, engineering, software) uses Google. I have heard complaints about the ads, but I use the sheets on a daily basis, and we all use the drive to share and collaborate on most files. No complaints on that front. I really like sheets because I learned how to use AppScript to automate a lot and I can't imagine working on anything without that functionality. Same goes for docs, slides and the rest of the suite. We do have a guy who handles all the support and set-up though so I don't have the full perspective on this.
known 4y ago
legitster 4y ago
I've never much cared for Google Workspaces. Give me dedicated desktop applications. Our corporate Google drive is a hot useless mess of ugly, half-finished files. > I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off. Microsoft Office is still a big player, and I personally really like the 365 ecosystem.
godshatter 4y ago
I was one of those people who was hesitant to jump on the cloud bandwagon as a personal user, I didn't trust it. I didn't foresee the random account closings, but I file them under "service interruptions I can't predict". I don't own a business, but if I did I'd strongly question every attempt to give up control. There is nothing worse than having your business threatened by some crazy algorithm that won't stop banning you for who knows what obscure reason, or whatever the next thing will be in a few years. It's obviously an unaccounted for risk and it should be handled as one. If my business depends on it and I can't reposition fast enough, it could be disastrous. I also distrust "free". If I'm not signing a contract, I have to assume I don't have any real recourse if something random like this happens.
yumindev 4y ago
I used google ads in 2009 when it was still doing business in China. Before I made the payment, i can always get through their cell phone, after I made the payment, there is no human tech support. And they own me 500 CNY.
Tozen 4y ago
The OP is not alone in being screwed over by Google. I mean, your small business can get absolutely wrecked by them, and they don't seem to care. There appears to be out of control malicious targeting, blacklisting, suspensions, banning, shadow banning, and privacy violations without accountability or due process. The opinions of many is that Google is very unreliable, unless you are a big enough customer for them to care. It gets really weird when you start paying for various Google services, but apparently are not paying enough. There can be an expectation of customer service and support, that is not there. Even worse, if you are not big enough to matter or paying them enough, seems you can easily get stepped on (to include odd suspensions). Your business revenues can possibly decrease, where you thought previously it would been a good idea to use Google services and products. Very good argument, as a small business, not to rely on Google. Find other ways, with better customer support and less weirdness. Have low expectations of Google, like you would street gangsters in the hood squeezing local unsuspecting businesses for cash.
tempnow987 4y ago
10 years+ ago I tried to get google apps (paid) setup for a nonprofit. Got in some weird doomloop / eventual consistency issue with the temp domain they assign being the admin At the time support was no help. Then I got a google home and it didn't work with my other google workspace account (I hear this was eventually fixed after like 5 years). Compared to Amazon is interesting. On Amazon.com I had a tricky high value return that really would take some thought to see I was owed the funds (some shipment mess with tracking issues). Someone worked it out and I got my money (maybe they looked at 10+ years of pretty high use with few returns in this). And AWS dev support used to be good too (haven't tried recently).
Chyzwar 4y ago
I am now working on a startup idea. We use: Fastmail for email Github for code, actions, registry and projects management Discord for comms Obsydian + Git for notes Cloudflare for domains, analytics Hetzner Cloud for hosting We are not at stage to advertise (pre MVP) but I made a decision to avoid Google from day one.
- helloworld11 4y ago
  How about advertising? Do you plan on using adwords, or do you have any alternative platforms/services you think are useful?
  - Chyzwar 4y ago
    We are building product for public sector. We plan to use a combination of direct sales and advertising on conferences and expert groups.
floatinglotus 4y ago
It’s complete BS and between the forced upgrade to a paid account for the same email I’ve used for about 10 years AND the lack of response to an Adsense issue where I could not run ads for a YEAR because Google thought a JPEG was malicious software, I’m moving everything I own away from Google. Already moved the email and domains, working on the drive stuff now.
kkfx 4y ago
My main struggle is more broad: I dislike modern crappy and archaic IT toolchains. For instance I see no points in using Meet/Teams/Zoom when we can do the same without a central service, but so far beside few limited software like Jami or classic, buggy and expensive stuff (classic VoIP gears) there is almost nothing and more important nothing spread so even if that's theoretically perfectly possible avoid those modern platforms I simply can't: being able to talk to myself alone is not much interesting. Similarly I hate when people send .docx instead of a pdf with proper forms (and when people print then scan documents, or take photos of their screen to send them instead of a screenshot) etc... Google by itself does not sell anything more crappier then it's competitors, so I "hate" them equally seeing not much differences between them. Beside that in corporate terms, it's not only a matter of internal choices stakeholders choices have to be taken into account and in the present time it's no less tedious avoiding Alphabet than using it, unfortunately...
_8j50 4y ago
I use their other enterprise products and they are a bit interesting. They do listen to feedback more than the competition when you pay them enough but they seem continually lack perspective of their users who live outside the Google bubble. As a result, they can be user unfriendly and have a steep learning curve or bug tolerant, by which I mean I get the feeling they expect users to be comfortable debugging and troubleshooting a bit or figuring things out from minimal documentation. I mean at the end their products are good. My theory is they are biased by statistics, where normally Google culture might be tolerant of issues to .1% of users here and there (which is still millions of users) but at their scale, when this becomes a culture it adds up fast. But that fail-fast culture is also crucial to being innovative without costing a lot of money.
atoav 4y ago
I might be the wrong person to comment on this, but I would never even remotely have the idea to use any google product as part of my business other than their web search. I don't really see the advantage this would give me over any desktop solution at all, while giving me a ton of disadvantages. Any update could destroy my companies work, and there would be nothing I could do. I can't guarantee data privacy for both myself (trade secrets?) and my customers (data protection laws?). I can't really build automated infrastructure on top of google because they could change any part of the product ever so slightly without notice and have it break things with a big crash (or maybe even worse: silently). Infrastructure that you are in control of is better than infrastructure that you are not in control of, if the core of your business depends on it.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
Safari isn't a good browser for modern powerful web apps. I stopped using it once it killed an active Google Meet tab. Hello, I'm talking here, I don't care how resource-intensive it is right now, give me a warning if you'd like. That wouldn't solve most of your problems, but on my M1 MBP I very rarely get any freezes with Sheets, and I often have thousands of rows there.
Rastonbury 4y ago
I think you hit the points yourself, Google is an advertising company that also makes business software. They never really had to offer support for SMBs, even for Ads, you need like double digit million spend to have a account manager. I've heard similar complaints from friends at big cos who moved to Workspace and even from Googlers themselves. In terms of competitors, MS and Zoho the big ones are actually productivity software companies.

221 points by sqlpipe 4y ago

AnotherRando 4y ago

I'd prescribe libreoffice and nextcloud to your affliction, but my approach will be downvoted into oblivion for a myriad of Reasons™

PaulHoule 4y ago

Google docs is a joke.

mountainriver 4y ago
Huh?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs. I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease. Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite. I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I used Microsoft Office for years. Leaving aside collaborative editing which has been a game-changer for me (and, of course, you can get from Microsoft as well now), Google products do everything* I need and most of the features in Office just get in the way. *I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier to use word for compatibility with someone else--but for the most part I much prefer using Google day-to-day.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I see Excel as the weak point in Office, at least from the viewpoint of getting the right answers. There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults. There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 in floating point numbers (hint: none of those numbers actually exist in the floating point number system, when you ask for 0.1 you get a different number that happens to print out as '0.1') There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it. However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.
      - wesnerm2 4y ago
        Former Excel developer here. In Excel 97, the difference between the values needed to be less than 1e-16 times the magnitudes of the operands to be considered equal. It makes sense since such a small proportion is unlikely to occur by chance through arithmetic without the values being "equal" in the original base.
      - InflexHQ 4y ago
- The_rationalist 4y ago

jqpabc123 4y ago

Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives. Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
Thank you for saying that. We will have to band together and fight against Google. I think we should have a separate category on HN to expose Google's evil doings.
ford 4y ago
Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? I struggle to make the connection between those kinds of business apps and advertising. Perhaps they get some usage data of how/when people work? I do believe much of what Google does (i.e. chrome) is to benefit their ads business, but I think it's a bit cynical to think that's true of every product they have. FWIW I've worked at companies that use both Microsoft + Google suites (mostly drive + calendar + mail) and generally preferred Google's. I did not have any issues like the post mentions.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  >Do you think Google is reading the contents of drive documents? It literally says in gdrive tos that they read the docs, yes they do . "Our automated systems analyse your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, and spam and malware detection,"
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    They actually removed the statement that you're quoting from the current version of the Google Drive terms of service. (The old version you're quoting is still available online, but it's under an "/archive" URL.) That being said, I've read through all the Google Terms of Service online, and I can't actually figure out whether they still use Google Drive content for customized search results.

mikece 4y ago

Makes me think of a question I've pondered but to which I don't have an answer: is there a way to use Libre Office synched through cloud storage such that multiple people can work on different parts of the same document at the same time and see each other's changes?

theandrewbailey 4y ago
There is a Libreoffice "cloud" project, but I'm not sure how stable and reliable it is. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
doubled112 4y ago
Nextcloud with Collabora CODE has worked pretty well for me, but please keep in mind I'm only using it at home. They offer a more enterprise option, I believe. CODE is more the development track.
- trelane 4y ago
  Collabora is also a major LibreOffice developer. They're pretty great from about all standpoints.

endisneigh 4y ago

dear diary... In any case, Google has plenty of competition in the areas you're talking about. Try the Office suite + Microsoft Ads.

troymc 4y ago
I agree. Other options are Zoho [1] and ONLYOFFICE [2]. [1] https://www.zoho.com/ https://www.zoho.com/ [2] https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/
arkitaip 4y ago
Microsoft Office+Outlook+Teams is some of the worst software I've recently used. Poorly designed and poorly integrated with tons of overlapping functionality cracks where productivity goes to die.

dariusj18 4y ago

I decided I wanted to start a blog and run ads on it, created a google ads account and was immediately blocked with no means of redress or support, only automated "tough luck" replies.

sqlpipe 4y ago
Me too! Upon appeal, they emailed me back saying "we can confirm your account isn't suspended"... It's like what are you talking about? I'm looking right at a big red banner saying my account is suspended! My hopes are not high for a fast resolution.

mountainriver 4y ago

Yeah they have edges and the support is bad, but they still kind of hit a sweet spot of good ux and features all tied into the google account you probably already use for mail/search. I think we will see more competitors in this space though. Google isn’t investing enough into it and there is opportunity.

Rastonbury 4y ago
I think its kinda funny that Office is so ubiquitous that everyone forgets how the productivity software market is like. Microsoft has 90% of it, so credit to Google for taking on the incumbent. It will be insanely hard for any challenger to dislodge MS from a company with thousands of employees, let alone build multiple products to beat all of the ones bundled in Office. The moat is large, like taking on Google themselves in search/ads

probably_wrong 4y ago

> Is this a problem of my own making (...)? Or is this a feeling that others get? I can understand why you "had" to rely on Google Ads. But in my opinion choosing Google Workspace/Drive falls unfortunately under "problem of your own making". None of the problems you describe is new nor unknown, and there are plenty of products that are just as good. > I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off. I think that that's the issue: maybe not in ads, but there is competition for everything else.

jatins 4y ago
> and there are plenty of products that are just as good. Other than MS Office, what's a good suite providing all of shared docs, spreadsheets, email, and a cloud drive?
- warrenm 4y ago
  If you're in the Apple ecosystem, file sharing through iCloud and the Apple quite of apps is pretty good (not quite as good as O365, but worlds better than Google Docs)
  - booi 4y ago
    I have to disagree here. iCloud file sharing is atrociously bad. I share a fairly minimal amount of files with another apple account and there's constant sync issues, it's not anywhere near realtime or even "soon". Shared files and folders routinely never show up in iCloud drive even when they appear on the web interface. Restarts seem to be required to fix problems as they arise.
    - warrenm 4y ago
      I've had nary an issue in the last several eyars since first trying it ... guess this may be a ymmv situation?

stefanve 4y ago

I worked a lot with both MS online offerings and google's. My own money go's to MS when it comes to documents etc . It is better than the offering of google especially if you need a bit more the the basics. Support is also better. I don't thing that google office suit is bad just that MS is better That being said I'm contamplating to stop with MS as I have less needs for a good office suit and just use what apple offers

josefresco 4y ago

Google Analytics Google Ads Google Workspace All terrible experiences with overly complex UIs and a nightmare to use for small biz.

taylodl 4y ago

* > I've been trying to start a business lately, and as many people do, have chosen to rely on Google's suite of products.* Just a reminder, most businesses fail - so doing what many people do is not necessarily the best thing to do. Having said that, it's rather foolish to have your business depend on Google. They have repeatedly demonstrated they're not good business partners and the main thrust of their business isn't in providing products and services for businesses. They don't support their services, they'll drop them at a moment's notice without any regard to the impacts to your business, and there's no way to get ahold of a human being when things inevitably go sour. Why do you want to partner with someone like that? I bash on the technical merits of Windows all day long but one thing Microsoft has done well over its nearly 50 year history is serving the needs of business. It's in their DNA. Office 365 is a very capable, and supported, platform. Nice thing is you can run it on a Mac too!

Cordivae 4y ago
Exactly. They make major decisions, give you less than 3 months to completely change things you depend on. And you can't even get someone on the phone (or even email for god-sake) to complain to.
jupp0r 4y ago
Sorry, but as a user, Office 365 is a nightmare to use. Outlook on Mac can’t even do in-line email quotes. Sharing documents in your org is done via SharePoint(tm), the greatest nightmare on the planet. Don’t get me started on MS teams. Google products are much better from a UX perspective imho.
- version_five 4y ago
  I think it's just a matter of opinion. I've used both O365 and GSuite extensively at different jobs, and after the initial switch, they are not too different, each has their annoyances, but I don't see a major change in productivity or quality of output between the two. In my business I like the option of sharing a .docx or .pptx and not having to ask a client to use google docs to view stuff. But when I had google docs, I made it work. I agree with the root comment that MS is much more business oriented though. At the end of the day, Google's "products" are still just a ruse to sell ads, so they don't have the institutional focus on solving business problems that MS has (not that MS is in any way perfect)

Cordivae 4y ago

I hate Google Workspace so much. Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users. I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable. All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google. I'm a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won't even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.

fatnoah 4y ago
>All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. Who owns the domain here? I use a custom domain with Gmail Workspaces, but I own the domain, and therefore control the MX records. The only thing I'd lose in a switch is stored email messages, but there are ways to download those.
- Cordivae 4y ago
  Yes. I own the domains. And if they go through with this I will move and leave Google's ecosystem entirely. It will be a huge pain in the ass trying to do it for my grandparents though.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    Gotcha. Yeah, IT for the parents & grandparents is definitely a challenge for things like this.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      It's a challenge for everybody. Having to put people who aren't computer savvy through it is just a reminder of what a pain in the ass it is... The fact that we can self-service doesn't make it less of an annoyance than we have to do something. And at this point, the pattern is clear. Google Business products are free until they are not. Building them into your infrastructure is taking on technical debt that you will have to pay down in the future, either by actually buying the product when they decide it is no longer free or by switching to an alternative. I still run into websites with a big API disabled rectangle where their Google maps integration used to be.

T3RMINATED 4y ago

salawat 4y ago

Google's stuff is barely hastily patched together, hard to reason through crap. It works, don't get me wrong. But I'm helping a family member start a business on the tech front, and most of their offerings are opaque to her. Built by tech people to be used by tech people, without the benefit of good, solid, onramp documentation, tooling, and user hostile offering design. Example: don't even try to admin Drive with anything less than business Standard, despite the fact centralized file handling is most useful to those with lower data quotas. The sharing is a mess. And I was horrified that most searches for Google drive administration were either docs that tried to sell you on drive, or internet public drives of individual users who just left stuff out there with personal information in it waiting to get reaped. At this point, it really frightens me what Google is trying to normalize in computing.

Kalanos 4y ago

And there is no way to provide feedback!

FlyNestor 4y ago

The advantage of dealing with small businesses in tech is that they are not huge cold monsters.

pocketsand 4y ago

I created a small ad campaign to advertise a side project. The projects makes no money, has no plan for monetization, does not use passwords. The only personal data it collects is an email address. I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected. I have occasionally tried to resubmit the appeal, but it says "please wait 3-5 business days before submitting a new appeal." I wait more than that and get the same message. I've called Google to try to talk to them. However, once it asks for my contact information, it tells me that they cannot talk to me because my account is suspended. It's a circular nightmare. I currently do not needs ads so it's not a hardship. But it is extremely frustrating. EDIT: One irony is that it is the same card I use to pay for my other Google services, linked through the same payment backend. They have no issue charging that card for my other services. But for Ads, it's suspicious. Who knows.

sqlpipe 4y ago
"I've called Google to try to talk to them"... Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"
- pocketsand 4y ago
  To their credit, the automated system told me I was banned and couldn't talk to anyone until I got unbanned, so I never got anyone on the phone.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    Sounds like a good ol' curfew pass A38.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Sounds like someone forgot to fill out the form twenty seven B stroke 6.

mcs_ 4y ago

> their search engine is still the best, sorry haters Naming or using the "hater" word in the sentence does not make us in the right side of the story. Considering users of other search engines as Haters does not sound right. You think is the best, fine. Recently today, in this network, there is an analysis about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229

huffer 4y ago
as far as I understood it, it was a tongue-in-cheek, a joke... or are you trolling too (in which case joke's on me :D)?
- mcs_ 4y ago
  You got me...
  - huffer 4y ago
    yeah.. these days you really can't tell; every opinion, its counter-opinion, its meta-counter, its sarcastic spin, its trolling version, its counter-trolling, meta-counter-trolling versions.. everything (in the absence of body language cues etc.) is equally likely, which if I recall correctly is the definition of maximal entropy of information, i.e. random noise

dep_b 4y ago

Microsoft has actual customer service Just don't touch Teams and you'll be OK.

warrenm 4y ago
I never understand the hate Teams gets on HN - I use it more-or-less all day in both $WORK and $CUSTOMER environments ... rarely have more than a momentary hiccup in file sharing, screen sharing, group calls, chats, task tracking ...
- dep_b 4y ago
  Mac user here: - It forces the discrete GPU for no apparent reason - I cannot be in multiple teams, which is terrible to freelancers - It has no AppleScript support compared to the excellent support of all other office apps, nor System Events - Having connectivity issues with calls where Hangouts (or whatever it's called nowadays) just works fine
  - warrenm 4y ago
    Never noticed the GPU issue (running an M1 MacBook Pro) I'm in multiple Teams by being on $WORK on my laptop and in a VDI instance for $CUSTOMER Honestly: never had a use for AppleScript ...haven't found anything I've wanted to automate on my Macs for the last decades The calls issue is the only thing that's ever a hiccup ... and it's rare (and when it does hiccup, it's on my end (ie Zoom doesn't work either)

gumby 4y ago

Drive is incredible…ly terrible. Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later. The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac. I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, the marketing plan for a major public company often mentioned on HN, and other documents clearly accidentally stored/shared with this group.

thisiscorrect 4y ago
I'm not making the trip. It sounds like you're saying users are moving files to the the wrong folders on their computers and the desktop tool respects that. What should the software do differently?
- huffer 4y ago
  I guess the idea was that it's very confusing for non-technical people, and very easy to misplace.. (sorry if your message was accompanied by an "/s" -- I didn't see any)
ghaff 4y ago
I can usually find the docs I've created pretty easily--but then I'm pretty good about sensibly filing things. But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.
- gumby 4y ago
  And docs shared with me can’t be moved into my filesystem
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Whether you can make a snapshot copy depends on permissions I think. But, yes, what I'd really like to do in many cases is to basically create a symlink to documents I know I'll be referencing/working with somewhere that they aren't mixed in with all the shared meeting presentations and the like I'll never look at again.

akselmo 4y ago

I would never use google for my business. I would rather self host it, especially with a small team or solo.

Saphyel 4y ago

I have used everything from google (as a typical user and as dev using their GCP) and everything they do "works" I feel like they do something messy and that's it. Kind of let's throw products and the client will figure out and if it isn't successful or we lose our main team we shut down the product.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Just go 100% Linux with the LibreOffice suite and if the business takes off, kick down a sizable donation.

IYasha 4y ago

You're not alone.

goopthink 4y ago

I completely agree - this is nearly verbatim a personal frustration I recorded in my work log from a few days ago: Extremely frustrated with Google Shopping ads. I can’t understand how they make money. Spent an hour trying to figure out how to: - Add custom UTM parameters (can’t unless with a manual feed, it looks like) because Google doesn’t doesn’t seem to track shopping ads unless you install extra JS events and modify google analytics - Change search queries that products come up for (after deeper research, look like you can’t - again, handled by the data feed but your product title must be now SEO’d to all heck to hit the right keywords. Good luck if you have an original product name) - Fix the product disapprovals (their bot was too dumb to understand how to navigate native shopify variants, it keeps seeing a mismatch between a variant and its price… and this is the data feed that Googles own app in Shopify generates!) - Understand why the shopping ads dashboard in Google and the in-Shopify google shopping ads dashboard show different product disapprovals... just why? Genuinely confused here. It’s ridiculous. It wasn’t this hard a few years ago. In the quest to add more ‘automation’ and ‘smartness’ they’ve made it so dumb and so bad it drives me up the wall. It reminds me of the time when a friend tried to do Google’s recommendations for “smart” ads and it optimized his local North Carolina health store ads to ads for dieticians targetting neighboring states, because of a few logical algorithmic leaps of “well this is what other users see success with, with ads like yours.” He wasted a few hundred dollars and time fielding confused calls, until we reverted the campaign, turned all the recommendations off and made it a simple, dumb but effective campaign. What a joke. A horribly infuriating joke played by a group of product managers and engineers. They are literally leaving so much money on the table because the platform is so unusable (speaking for experience: I regularly have people turn to me asking for help setting up their ads because they can’t make heads or tails of it).

rpastuszak 4y ago

> by using Safari instead of Chrome, and not configuring my services properly I use Chrome for work and Safari as my personal browser and the amount of FUD created by Google is almost hilarious. In 90% of cases it's just a small glitch (e.g. a piece of UI looking a bit shitty on Safari), but in the remaining 10%... I get spiking CPU usage to the point where I could start frying eggs on my MacBook. I still prefer my browser being occasionally sluggish when using Google services to the ad-infested cesspool my parents' Chrome is. OK, my Safari can get a bit slow when using Gmail, but at least I'm not browsing the web through a storefront.

delgaudm 4y ago

You might take a look at the Zoho One suite, my experience with Zoho has been great as a small biz, and you definitely get a human when you need support, they are very responsive and helpful. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.

sqlpipe 4y ago
I love Zoho! Used it on another project, and will certainly use it going forward.

asiachick 4y ago

are you playing for google apps/gsuite for a custom domain? I have had no trouble getting live support that way. Ymmv

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Observe HN posts for a while. You will notice, that whenever Goolge and their support comes up, comments are rich with experiences/anecdotes of people, who have been stonewalled by Google. Their support is non-existent. Having proper support would cost them lots of money. Same for their other big disservices like YouTube. How many people have been banned for non-sensical reasons and tried to appeal. It has become something of a common knowledge, that there is basically no support worth mentioning, at least in the tech circles. Oh and don't think for a second, that using MS' alternative web products (Office 365) is much better. You pay for the probably buggiest office experience on the planet.

ilamont 4y ago
I can confirm Microsoft ads (Bing ads or whatever they're called) are even worse. We shut off an underperforming campaign and they were automatically restarted, repeatedly, until we disabled the entire account.
blip54321 4y ago
It's better. I hate Office 365 usability with a passion, and I hate the bugs, but it's much better than periodically having a fire as Google burns your business to the ground. Microsoft deals with businesses, and it works.

fsflover 4y ago

> Am I alone in this? No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057

allisdust 4y ago

I have been trying to increase the quotas they set on my gcp account and the whole thing has been an absolute madness : 1) Try increasing number of nodes - > fails with some cryptic message saying number of in use addresses is hitting the quota limit. 2) Search through their absolutely garbage console to go to the exact page which has the quotas. Try editing - > See a tooltip (not even an error message just a tooltip) saying I can't do it my self and has to contact their support. 3) Contact their billing support and ask for quota increase. After taking all the details they redirect me to their sales support. 4) Contact their sales support and its like dealing with second hand car sales people. Even after clearly stating that I'm an existing customer, they want a complete biography of my whole business, its needs and everything else. At the end they say they don't have anyway to actually raise the quote increase request from their side. 5) They have helpfully assigned me a relationship manager for further 'assisting' me with evaluating their products and that I got a meeting request for next week to discuss our 'needs'. Absolute garbage company with third rate support and sales people. And I can say that with confidence because I had the exact opposite experience with Linode when trying to raise limits on my account. Got a human to both respond and increase the limit almost immediately and I didn't need to provide any details about my business. I'm with OP - Google products are absolute trash.

notreallyserio 4y ago
It's funny they manage to have resource quotas but folks around here claim they couldn't possibly add spend quotas.

franczesko 4y ago

> their support is almost nonexistent #1 reason why I will never use GCP. With regards to their advertising services, last year their support took a grotesk turn - or account managers told us, that we have to create tickets to get help (which in fact mitigates the need of having account managers in the first place)

_jal 4y ago

One aspect of building a business is resilience: What happens when things break? Because things break. I personally would not use Google business products for a startup. They're fine for established shops where when Google fucks up your account, they 'know' who you are. If you're a small-$ nobody, the support policy is "sucks to be you". But everyone has different risk tolerances and fond feelings for certain companies. More important than that choice is to ask, "what do I do when Google/whoever breaks, or I have to generate a quote and the connectivity is down", and so on. Speaking of which, is Atlasssian still rebuilding?

dezb 4y ago

move to zoho.com FFS

milesward 4y ago

We help with this, it can be easier. Miles@sada.com As good as their products are, setup and config and ops are invariably too pesky, so we train experts to know how to efficiently navigate.

lordnacho 4y ago

> their support is almost nonexistent This is the critical bit. If you're happy with a vanilla product where you essentially search for how to access every feature ("how do I make a pivot table?"), Google Suite is for you. I use it for just low-value bags of documents, nothing critical in it at all. I never have a need for special features, and anything I do need I'm confident is actually there because I only use spreadsheets for totally vanilla stuff. I also don't depend on anything being available, so I avoid the pain every time there's an outage. I think for that kind of service, a few bucks a month is about right. For anything that needs a higher level of service, you don't really want to rely on a business whose strategy revolves around minimal customer interaction.

tome 4y ago

1. Nerd snipe Hacker News, for example with a story about how Google's services are declining in quality 2. Link to your company website 3. Better marketing than your allegedly suspended AdWords account!

beej71 4y ago

The primary reason I don't use Adsense is the risk that I'll be locked out of my Google account for unknown reasons. I've heard the same advice here on HN: if you're using Google tools for anything, do not use Adsense.

RugnirViking 4y ago
This is something that has worried me somewhat as well. Is there any sort of workaround? Can you use a burner Google account for it?

WYepQ4dNnG 4y ago

"Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue." Most of their money comes from Ads, they couldn't give two crap about all other services, including cloud. And that's why they keep launching and discontinuing products.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

My company (~30 people, healthcare field, engineering, software) uses Google. I have heard complaints about the ads, but I use the sheets on a daily basis, and we all use the drive to share and collaborate on most files. No complaints on that front. I really like sheets because I learned how to use AppScript to automate a lot and I can't imagine working on anything without that functionality. Same goes for docs, slides and the rest of the suite. We do have a guy who handles all the support and set-up though so I don't have the full perspective on this.

known 4y ago

legitster 4y ago

I've never much cared for Google Workspaces. Give me dedicated desktop applications. Our corporate Google drive is a hot useless mess of ugly, half-finished files. > I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off. Microsoft Office is still a big player, and I personally really like the 365 ecosystem.

godshatter 4y ago

I was one of those people who was hesitant to jump on the cloud bandwagon as a personal user, I didn't trust it. I didn't foresee the random account closings, but I file them under "service interruptions I can't predict". I don't own a business, but if I did I'd strongly question every attempt to give up control. There is nothing worse than having your business threatened by some crazy algorithm that won't stop banning you for who knows what obscure reason, or whatever the next thing will be in a few years. It's obviously an unaccounted for risk and it should be handled as one. If my business depends on it and I can't reposition fast enough, it could be disastrous. I also distrust "free". If I'm not signing a contract, I have to assume I don't have any real recourse if something random like this happens.

yumindev 4y ago

I used google ads in 2009 when it was still doing business in China. Before I made the payment, i can always get through their cell phone, after I made the payment, there is no human tech support. And they own me 500 CNY.

Tozen 4y ago

The OP is not alone in being screwed over by Google. I mean, your small business can get absolutely wrecked by them, and they don't seem to care. There appears to be out of control malicious targeting, blacklisting, suspensions, banning, shadow banning, and privacy violations without accountability or due process. The opinions of many is that Google is very unreliable, unless you are a big enough customer for them to care. It gets really weird when you start paying for various Google services, but apparently are not paying enough. There can be an expectation of customer service and support, that is not there. Even worse, if you are not big enough to matter or paying them enough, seems you can easily get stepped on (to include odd suspensions). Your business revenues can possibly decrease, where you thought previously it would been a good idea to use Google services and products. Very good argument, as a small business, not to rely on Google. Find other ways, with better customer support and less weirdness. Have low expectations of Google, like you would street gangsters in the hood squeezing local unsuspecting businesses for cash.

tempnow987 4y ago

10 years+ ago I tried to get google apps (paid) setup for a nonprofit. Got in some weird doomloop / eventual consistency issue with the temp domain they assign being the admin At the time support was no help. Then I got a google home and it didn't work with my other google workspace account (I hear this was eventually fixed after like 5 years). Compared to Amazon is interesting. On Amazon.com I had a tricky high value return that really would take some thought to see I was owed the funds (some shipment mess with tracking issues). Someone worked it out and I got my money (maybe they looked at 10+ years of pretty high use with few returns in this). And AWS dev support used to be good too (haven't tried recently).

Chyzwar 4y ago

I am now working on a startup idea. We use: Fastmail for email Github for code, actions, registry and projects management Discord for comms Obsydian + Git for notes Cloudflare for domains, analytics Hetzner Cloud for hosting We are not at stage to advertise (pre MVP) but I made a decision to avoid Google from day one.

helloworld11 4y ago
How about advertising? Do you plan on using adwords, or do you have any alternative platforms/services you think are useful?
- Chyzwar 4y ago
  We are building product for public sector. We plan to use a combination of direct sales and advertising on conferences and expert groups.

floatinglotus 4y ago

It’s complete BS and between the forced upgrade to a paid account for the same email I’ve used for about 10 years AND the lack of response to an Adsense issue where I could not run ads for a YEAR because Google thought a JPEG was malicious software, I’m moving everything I own away from Google. Already moved the email and domains, working on the drive stuff now.

kkfx 4y ago

My main struggle is more broad: I dislike modern crappy and archaic IT toolchains. For instance I see no points in using Meet/Teams/Zoom when we can do the same without a central service, but so far beside few limited software like Jami or classic, buggy and expensive stuff (classic VoIP gears) there is almost nothing and more important nothing spread so even if that's theoretically perfectly possible avoid those modern platforms I simply can't: being able to talk to myself alone is not much interesting. Similarly I hate when people send .docx instead of a pdf with proper forms (and when people print then scan documents, or take photos of their screen to send them instead of a screenshot) etc... Google by itself does not sell anything more crappier then it's competitors, so I "hate" them equally seeing not much differences between them. Beside that in corporate terms, it's not only a matter of internal choices stakeholders choices have to be taken into account and in the present time it's no less tedious avoiding Alphabet than using it, unfortunately...

_8j50 4y ago

I use their other enterprise products and they are a bit interesting. They do listen to feedback more than the competition when you pay them enough but they seem continually lack perspective of their users who live outside the Google bubble. As a result, they can be user unfriendly and have a steep learning curve or bug tolerant, by which I mean I get the feeling they expect users to be comfortable debugging and troubleshooting a bit or figuring things out from minimal documentation. I mean at the end their products are good. My theory is they are biased by statistics, where normally Google culture might be tolerant of issues to .1% of users here and there (which is still millions of users) but at their scale, when this becomes a culture it adds up fast. But that fail-fast culture is also crucial to being innovative without costing a lot of money.

atoav 4y ago

I might be the wrong person to comment on this, but I would never even remotely have the idea to use any google product as part of my business other than their web search. I don't really see the advantage this would give me over any desktop solution at all, while giving me a ton of disadvantages. Any update could destroy my companies work, and there would be nothing I could do. I can't guarantee data privacy for both myself (trade secrets?) and my customers (data protection laws?). I can't really build automated infrastructure on top of google because they could change any part of the product ever so slightly without notice and have it break things with a big crash (or maybe even worse: silently). Infrastructure that you are in control of is better than infrastructure that you are not in control of, if the core of your business depends on it.

ymolodtsov 4y ago

Safari isn't a good browser for modern powerful web apps. I stopped using it once it killed an active Google Meet tab. Hello, I'm talking here, I don't care how resource-intensive it is right now, give me a warning if you'd like. That wouldn't solve most of your problems, but on my M1 MBP I very rarely get any freezes with Sheets, and I often have thousands of rows there.

Rastonbury 4y ago

I think you hit the points yourself, Google is an advertising company that also makes business software. They never really had to offer support for SMBs, even for Ads, you need like double digit million spend to have a account manager. I've heard similar complaints from friends at big cos who moved to Workspace and even from Googlers themselves. In terms of competitors, MS and Zoho the big ones are actually productivity software companies.