We have true, paid support for Cloud Platform (https://cloud.google.com/support/).

As others (including downthread) have pointed out, Google definitely has a bad overall support reputation, but that's because nearly every (traditional) Google service is free and lacks this structured support model. Just like Cloud, if you're even a moderately large Ads customer, you get pretty good support!

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and want your business ;).

I wonder if the problem is more that Google has got terrible support for it's free offerings - maybe for justifiable business reasons. However the damage to their brand when they want to sell business critical services is an unintended consequence. (Similarly I think killing Reader was justifiable from their perspective but the damage to their reputation amongst a vociferous and possibly influential demographic has probably outweighed the cost of keeping it going... They can't launch a service without someone popping up to remind us about Reader)

I miss Reader (though I'm amused that it let Feedly take off, and they're a Cloud customer!).

One thing often not considered ("Why not just have someone keep it running?") is that you really have to keep a team of people on it (in case there's a CVE or something) or at least familiar enough with the code to fix it. There's also the double standard of "you haven't added new features in forever!" (Maybe this wouldn't have applied to Reader though).

But, I agree if we could have kept it on life support somehow, we wouldn't have (as many) people asking "What if they shut down Cloud?!?". Conveniently, as people get a sense of how serious Google Cloud is about this business, even on HN I'm seeing this less.

Given my experience with AWS. Even if Google has no support whatsoever, it's still better than the paid support from AWS ^^

I gave my opinion on this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12323999#12324494

tl;dr it makes money, will make a lot more, they're going to support it.