Google absolutely needs to fix their trust problem, but it is also completely wrong to compare support between their paid GCP customers vs their mostly free Android app developers.
Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly, AND they were able to resolve my problem and issue a refund. So maybe they are improving on that end too.
But why? Per OP - they'd be willing to pay for an enterprise support contract. Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE?
It's one thing to tell people using a free service that their only option is automated support - it's quite another to tell customers you just flat-out refuse to offer a paid support model. That tells me that you are organizationally deficient at providing customer support. I've yet to hear anyone using paid g suite speak praises about their support experience if they ever have issues. Quite the opposite.
> Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE?
Well, for one thing, everyone you ask except apparently the HN comment section will tell you.
I've probably seen this exact conversation play out 10+ times now. Someone says that GCP has poor customer support by analogy to other, mostly free services. Someone who actually uses GCP customer support claims that this is not the case. Some third (or perhaps the original) person blows them off and insists that Google's behavior toward the statistically adversarial and free users of other services must be representative of Google's behavior toward an entirely different group of users.
The point is not that it must be, the point is that if you've burned your bridges once before, you're going to have a hard time selling again. If I've been screwed once by Google (and I have been, multiple times), selling me GCP has to overcome those trust issues.
Not to mention that I have had rocky issues with GCP as well. There was documentation that lied about its caching behavior, cost me over $1000 of my personal money, they took over a year to fix the bug and offered no reimbursement. Maybe I'm a small fry and don't deserve support, but this is the kind of customer management that Google is absolutely terrible at.
I don't know why you find it baffling. I've tried to use GSuite customer support (as a paid-for customer) and found it terrible. Why would I roll the dice and GCP a try given I might have had concerns about support for other products in the past?
You go to a restaurant, try a dish and it gives you food poisoning. Do you have to go back and try every single item on the menu? The other ones might be great, but realistically you probably go to a different restaurant after that.
This is not what I'm talking about. A data point that GSuite has poor customer support is actually useful! GSuite and GCP are bundled together on Google's financial reports, and probably overlap a lot in customer support expectations since they both handle paying customers. So someone sharing their perspective that GSuite has poor customer support is contributing to the discussion. It's infinitely more valuable that then 9000th iteration of "Remember how Google killed Google Reader?"
To give you the depth of my misgiving here, I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider. Maybe they won't kill GCP, but I could easily see them gradually lowering their focus until I would regret having built anything on it.
It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last.
I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
> I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider.
Maybe that's the case, but I can't see it. Cloud computing is such a huge business, it doesn't take more than a third-place position to make more money than say, Youtube. Some random article [1] has GCP's 2019 Q4 revenue at $2.6B compared to Youtube at $4.7B, and total revenue in the cloud market is definitely going up way faster than total revenue in the advertising market. Plus, the "Google sucks at products" narrative is based on a reputation that people at Google would much rather be building technology than products. Cloud computing seems like the perfect match for such a reputation. App Engine is almost as old as AWS, and looks very much like it started as an excuse to have something for Guido Van Rossum to do.
> I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple.
> So why doesn't the Android experience compare?
It came out in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit that Android had only made Google something like $10B since it started. So GCP is already making something like 10x what Android makes, and given cellphone saturation this will likely only grow.
> But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
AWS has a whole pile of services that you can tell no longer get any attention, or in some cases, even have full time staff anymore. Services that still aren't integrated with CloudFormation after years and years because clearly nobody cares. A guarantee that the lights stay on and the service continues to handle requests is the most you can ask or get from any of the existing cloud providers.
I use Fi, when it was Project Fi they had great support. Now it is Google Fi and my last interaction with their support was bad enough that I am ready to switch. I would never trust Google with my business.
I work at Lyft and have to work directly with Google on several of their various enterprise offerings.
Their support is downright AWFUL. Getting someone from Google to help is so challenging that they have decided that in order to work with them on their enterprise offerings you must go through a 3rd party vendor. Their third party vendors are all small companies with which my organization has very little trust for.
I will never knowingly try to do anything with Google again after the hellish experience I have had dealing with them and their vendors so far, it just isn't worth it.
Google Ads and GSuite, which are paid products, have terrible customer support in my experience. Maybe our account was not big enough? With AWS, just the opposite: knowledgeable and fast. Was even able to put in feature requests.
Google payed support for GCE is absolutely embarrassingly terrible. To get to someone who knows what they are talking about you have to go through many many people who have zero clue, over frustrating course of many days. Every.single.time.
We're not going to be the biggest fish, but our spend is approaching $1mio per year. If you spend more than that and have a TAM YMMV.
