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It feels like every month or so there is another story like this about Google's customer support. For me it is one of the reasons I will *never* build on Google
by n0us 4y ago
It feels like every month or so there is another story like this about Google's customer support. For me it is one of the reasons I will *never* build on Google Cloud.
Combine this with their propensity to randomly shut down services and also jack up the prices of things by some wild amount overnight with no warning or justification. (Google Maps API and Kubernetes control plane.)
I would never consider risking all of my work on Google's reputation which is a shame because I'm sure the services themselves work relatively well. It feels like everyone outside of google is widely aware of these issues but everyone inside is completely blind to them.
Side Note: has anyone ever "won" an appeal with Google or does the system deny 100% of appeals?
- amirhirsch 4y agoI wrote this 10 years ago: "The other issue with Google is there is no button I can push to send an email to complain to Google about my terrible user experience or to get support with improving it. Larry Page should be reading such an inbox, because this is a huge weakness for Google and they probably don't even realize how bad it stinks. "
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- superchroma 4y agoamen to this. They should form no part of anyone's core business, unless you're abusing a free feature of theirs.
- mwint 4y agoIt seems like the way to win an appeal with Google is to somehow get in the internal escalation queue, usually by knowing an engineer or getting lucky on HN or similar.
- hogu 4y agoThis has not been true for years. My google ads account was blocked, I had several google engineer friends create internal tickets for my case, and none of it worked out.
- dylan604 4y agoSounds like you need better placed friends.
- jiggawatts 4y agoSounds like you would relish living in a communist dictatorship, where your position in society was determined by how highly placed your friends were.
- dylan604 4y agoNo, I just live in this reality. If the friends you have are not high enough on the food chain to get what you need done, then it's time to make friends in higher places.
- jiggawatts 4y ago… which makes you sound precisely like the people living in a communist dictatorship.
- epolanski 4y agoThat's not unique to dictatorships, and communist ones least of all.
- teddyh 4y agoHow friendly can people who work at Google really be?
- dylan604 4y agoSome of the most evil people have been super friendly. That's how they lure you in. It's kind of like The Firm. They lure you in with all of that glorious salary, all of those perks like free food, they let you work on projects that seem quite cool and almost decent at the beginning. Then, once you're accustomed to everything and are pretty locked in, they hit you with the shady stuff. So you kind of have to be friendly, otherwise, no new recruits would join up unless they were just sadists already.
- Eldt 4y agoIs it possible they're doing this in mass to benefit financially somehow?
- notriddle 4y agoHow do you benefit financially by refusing to take people’s money?
- Pxtl 4y agoI think Hanlon's razor applies here. Any benefit would be overwhelmed by the reputational damage of "if you use Google there's a non-zero chance they'll completely rugpull you for no reason and with no possibility of appeal".
- dylan604 4y agoEven cynical me would think this isn't true, but willing to be shown differently. However, I would be willing to believe that it's just laziness in how they are trying to protect themselves from something that has a similar look to known existing behaviors to malicious users. If an account shows any behavior that matches the same activity patterns that has been used by malicious users in the past, just shut down that account. The laziness comes from how they handle those accounts once flagged in that they just shut them down. The non-lazy method would probably not scale well, so they again chose the lazy way to not do anything else.
- username_my1 4y agoGoogle doesn't know how to do any non-competing product ... they ether build the best in class, and scale it so much that the edge cases don't matter or compete and lose each time from smartphones to cloud to all the services where it wasn't google in the lead by far. What I understood from people who work there it's impossible to even know how's responsible for what, so chaotic organizational structure and lake of accountability / ownership / freedom to take something to the finish line.
- red_trumpet 4y agoAndroid is the world wide market leader of smartphone operating systems, why do you claim Google lost smartphones?
- bastardoperator 4y agoProfits, look at Apple. They're not even close to selling the most phones, but they're making the most money from the smartphone market. When you have one of two choices and the second choice is much less profitable, from a business perspective, you're losing.
- thehappypm 4y agoMaybe, maybe not. Android is still a major, major feeder to other Google projects.
- bastardoperator 4y agoIt's not a maybe, Apple continues to be the leader in the space when it comes to profits despite shipping 87% less units. "Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments."
- 4y ago
- justinbaker84 4y agoI have been managing google ads for 12 years and I have never seen a suspended account win an appeal.
- pocketsand 4y agoI won an appeal for suspicious payment. But my account is still suspended because it thinks I have unpaid balances, which I do not. They've ignored this appeal for 3 weeks.
- nico 4y agoWhat do companies do when they get their accounts suspended/banned and they can’t get them reinstated? Just go against Google’s warning by creating new accounts hoping they don’t “get caught”?
- godshatter 4y agoI'm hoping they choose a competing advertising agency, even if they lose the bulk of their ad revenue by doing so. Something is better than nothing, so I'm hoping that's the case because Google needs real competition in this space badly.
- justinbaker84 4y agoChoosing another agency only works if you have them create the account. That is not a good option because then they own it and they pretty much always abuse that ownership by telling the client the account spent more than it did. For example they normally say they spent $10K when really they only spent $7K so they charge the client $10K plus fees and make an absurd amount of money. Also the client cannot take their account to another agency if they want to fire the existing agency. This is a big problem because the entire field is based on looking at historical performance of the account and making adjustments based on that data.
- dbmnt 4y ago> For example they normally say they spent $10K when really they only spent $7K so they charge the client $10K plus fees and make an absurd amount of money. That's just straight up fraud. It would be fairly easy to prove in court given Google has the truth and those records would be available via legal discovery.