10 ms·
>> on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer satisfaction is just a concept on a das
by ethbr0 4y ago
>> on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer satisfaction is just a concept on a dashboard to be trotted out at an all-hands meeting, tut-tutted about, and then forgotten about
From my exposure to GCP from the enterprise side, this rings true. The folks we worked with were polite, but seemed to be asking us about our needs as a one-off / outside the normal process.
With credit to the teams we interacted with, they were helpful and acted on our feedback (things like "As a customer, I need a dashboard that tracks my GCP spending"), but it was apparent this wasn't something they frequently did with customers.
"The maze is in the rat" is a great metaphor.
Execs want certain things ("Realtime visibility into all projects!" or "Stability!") but underappreciate the organizational opportunity cost in requiring them.
Is it more important to have perfectly tracked projects or projects which ship 20% faster?
And if the former, we all understand you're training your people to be like forever, right?
- bruce511 4y agoGoogle is famous for basically just ignoring customers. Or more accurately, ignoring users, since users are not customers. Customers are those spending money posting ads on search. Frankly even they get crap customer support, but at least they are customers. I'm no googler but it's clear "user support" (and "customer support") are not priorities at google, and that means other people _are_ priorities. So it's not exactly a shock to discover employees optimize to make other employees happy (measured) versus keeping users happy (not measured.) I factor that in when I decide if I want to be more than a user, if I want to be a customer. (So far the answer is basically "no".) And, as a user, I understand I'm not a customer and Google doesn't care about me, or my gmail account... So I treat my gmail account with the importance it deserves. So what though? This makes them happy, and they're all paid, so what does it matter what the outside world think or care?
- motoboi 4y agoI have been a enterprise customer of google cloud. There is a chasm between google cloud and microsoft azure. Azure sucks as a product, but they really, really, really want you as costumer. Damn, I get a weekly one-to-one with the guy which was part of the team that created their kubernetes offering, just because I needed someone with expertise in the matter to help us maximize the benefit or ours. NO EXTRA COST. With Google I got a guy that knows Kubernetes less than me. I sometimes get embarrassed asking them questions because they don't know how to answer but must come up with something to answer because the account manager is in the call. It feels like their poor account managers take a uphill battle just to get someone to talk to us. I feel sorry for them. Guess what happens? must deployments are in azure, even if the azure CLI sucks, the azure portal is a mess and azure products are inconsistent. But Google's GKE ingress takes 20 minutes to update (there is a years old bug opened, nobody cares), vs Azure application gateway taking 30 seconds. Both being very bad for us, but I get to talk to the Microsoft the guy who worked on that integration and discussing with him the pros and cons of using ingress-nginx instead. Google don't want us as costumers, they just want to brag about having a better cloud (they don't). (as a PS, please microsoft your employees don't like to answer questions on stack overflow. But great to be able to get stackoverflow answers from the product managers).
- dekhn 4y agoif you're on a call with an account manager and a support person, and the support person is clueless, politely shut down the meeting early, and then schedule a 10-minute with the account manager to tell them the support person isn't helping. As much as I hate personal relations, I frequently have to "herd cats" (contractors and cloud vendors). On the other hand, once in the while I get an absolute superstar and I work to keep them on my projects as long as possible.
- motoboi 4y agoYeah, this is what they can give me. Microsoft people offered us high profile people for free.
- com2kid 4y ago> Azure sucks as a product, but they really, really, really want you as costumer. Damn, I get a weekly one-to-one with the guy which was part of the team that created their kubernetes offering, just because I needed someone with expertise in the matter to help us maximize the benefit or ours. NO EXTRA COST. When I was at Microsoft, the highest tier of support contract got you meetings with the lead developers of whatever product you found a pri0 bug in. Found a way to crash the compiler and simple code changes weren't enough to work around it? A meeting with a member of the C++ compiler team would be arranged. Microsoft has a history of customer focus, though I fear that was very much diluted when MS got rid of their dedicated test orgs.
- wbsun 4y agoHow does that scale if there are many customers that need to meet the lead developers like OP get in weekly 1:1?
- garisingh 4y agoSorry to hear about your experience thus far. I'm actually on the GKE team. Happy to find some time to chat and get you in touch with the right folks from the GKE networking team. DM me on Twitter at @garitweets and we can connect.
- rwmj 4y agoThey don't seem to care about their corporate customers either. eg. corporate gmail spam filtering is fundamentally broken and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.
- nico 4y agoMy companies have been google customers for years, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with them, they’ve never cared about us. Bad service and sometimes impossible to reach a person.
- zie 4y agoYou are not a big customer to Google.
- nnurmanov 4y agoAh-ah. I am sure even if you had millions of $ in support fees, they still won't care about you. You have to have pay more, get a dedicated accounts team and let them manage issues internally.
- zie 4y agoMillions? That's not even in the right ballpark for them to notice one way or another. Google brought in around $284B in 2022, Big customers are at least double digits, so for Google, one needs to spend at least ~ 30B/yr to be considered a big customer to them.
- XargonEnder 4y agoI work for a company that has spent billions of dollars on Google ads in the last decade and it doesn't seem like we're a big customer either.
- cube2222 4y agoIt's worth noting that AWS is really good with this. Their paid technical support (the 100-200$ one) is great and responsive, with an easy way to escalate if a response isn't helpful.
- plantain 4y agoFor what it's worth, I had similar experiences with GCP's paid support. Callback from a real human within 10 minutes kind of support.
- primax 4y agoSo are most account managers, their paired SAs and escalations into product teams. Hell I got a sit down with the engineers in Amazon Go (the walk out of the shops and pay automatically thing) because I was curious. As a consulting partner!
- cm277 4y agoThe problem with the article is that every company wants to manage risk; turning risk into money is what a company, any company, does. Now bigger companies have processes, hierarchies, etc. to manage risk in a distributed way, because well they are bigger. But guess what these companies also have? profits! revenue! multiple products/services that produce that revenue that can be then assigned down at the appropriate level of hierarchy that took/mitigated/managed the original risk. Google doesn't. It's a single-product company with a single Profit Line and thousands of Loss lines and it's pretending to be something else. That's why they are so busy managing risk all the time; most of them don't have revenues to manage, aim for, use to be rewarded for. Google is a monopoly, a rentier on the internet. They need to be broken up and repurposed to multiple, actually value-creating companies. If not for the health of the internet, at least for the mental health of its employees it seems. (I would argue that Google's "free" products, like Android, are the worst thing that has happened to the internet; they cannot be broken up soon enough).
- drewda 4y agoFor example, it could be fascinating to see YouTube as a stand-alone company. Currently its revenues are masked under the "Google" part of Alphabet. It sounds like it's extremely profitable. It could be interesting to see YouTube perform as an independent entity on public markets alongside other media entities, rather than bundled into a "tech" company.
- Konnstann 4y agoFrom what I've heard, and from the decisions Google keeps making regarding revenue sharing, ads, etc. YouTube loses them a lot of money due to video storage costs. I believe they even restrict the quality of uploads for some users now to combat that, but don't quote me.
- quanticle 4y agoIs it more important to have perfectly tracked projects or projects which ship 20% faster? It's far more important to have perfectly tracked projects. A perfectly tracked project which is guaranteed to deliver on a particular day is gold. It makes planning for the rest of the organization much easier. To use a programming analogy, it's like the difference between latency and jitter for real-time systems. Many real-time systems will happily sacrifice considerable amounts of average latency, in order to minimize jitter. It's far better to have a process that completes in 200 ms every single time than it is to have a process that completes in 2ms most of the time, but, occasionally takes 2000ms. Similarly, from a managerial perspective, it's far better to have a team that gives you good visibility, allowing you to plan for a completion date (even if that date is farther into the future than you'd like) than it is to have a team that mostly finishes projects quickly, but occasionally bogs down and takes a year to finish a project that was initially estimated at two months. The problem is that far too many organizations have neither. They don't have visibility, and they finish projects late. For these organizations, your dichotomy is a false one — better tracking is how they will ship faster.
- ethbr0 4y ago> better tracking is how they will ship faster There's a reason PMs are reviled to mildly tolerated by engineers: they believe the map is the end product, not the territory. The correct answer to which is more important is "It depends." There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to ceding first mover advantage and losing the game. Largely what's being discussed in the article. More detailed and accurate project tracking and projection doesn't deliver quicker shipping. Effectively prioritizing outstanding work does. They're similar but definitely not the same.
- quanticle 4y agoThere are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to ceding first mover advantage and losing the game. Are there? Can you name some examples? Because when I think of technology, first-mover advantage counts for very little. The first successful web browser wasn't NCSA Mosaic. It was Netscape. The first successful portable music player wasn't the Nomad, it was the iPod. The Macintosh long predated Windows, but Windows has by far the larger market share. Same with iOS and Android. Google was far from the first search engine. Facebook was far from the first social network. Amazon didn't invent e-commerce. In automobiles, Ford was first to mass production, but it was overtaken by General Motors by the 1930s, and they both were in serious trouble when the Japanese auto manufacturers, which didn't even really get going until after World War 2, arrived. So in which business exactly does shipping 20% later lead to "losing the game"? If anything, the real risk is in shipping a half-baked product too soon.