I get what you're saying, but Google's history here is atrocious, which is why business' are skittish, people aren't just going to take their word for it. You go first, if you and 100 others have a good experience maybe that attitude will change. Until then, hard pass.

FWIW, I think Google has been turning things around for their paid services. I've had to contact Project Fi customer support a few times, and found it vastly superior to all previous experiences with telcos. They're also probably getting a ton of experience in dealing with enterprises thanks to GCP.

With that said, this announcement doesn't look like it has any relevance to regular consumers. I'm gradually migrating as many things as possible away from Google, having realized that I'd have no recourse if they locked me out my accounts. Their TOS [0] says services can be terminated at any time. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we had a guaranteed grace period for migrating away upon your Google Account being terminated. IANAL though, so maybe I missed something?

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

I manage several GSuite accounts. The tech support staff is friendly and helpful, but if the problem is outside their list of known issues or current outages, they're basically useless. They aren't developers and they have no access to investigate underlying system data/logs, let alone resolve anything.

...and that's where the true problem with Google is. There's no mechanism to report/escalate a well-defined and reproducible technical bug - even as a technical sysadmin with a paid account. ...and if a data issue only impacts a small number of people, it'll never get fixed.

The GSuite forums are bombarded with usability questions, and real tech issues are given the old "let's see which FAQ I can post to get some karma" response.

Calling the help desk might get the issue escalated, but it's far far more time consuming than if I could just put a normal bug report together with a screenshot.

Hi,

I actually work in the GSuite support organisation you refer to .

Firstly, I'm sorry if you feel that you weren't provided with an appropriate level of support. Or that troubleshooting took inordinate effort/time on your part.

Secondly, you probably know this, but there are multiple tiers of support - and there are meant to fairly well defined paths for escalation. Obviously the front line is very much basic initial troubleshooting for the average user - the products cater to a fairly wide range of technical skills/background.

Feel free to reach out to me anytime if you want - my HN username at <company that makes Chrome> dot com.

Likewise I've never had a problem contacting someone at Adwords. I've spent like £200 total as well so I'm not exactly a big business spender.

They are, and it comes down to a time/cost thing. Yes, you can roll your own infrastructure, domain and manage your Win/Mac laptops (which most places already do) or you can see if using Chromebooks can save on employees that don't need full laptops.

But most likely you're still going to need that AD or LDAP managed infrastructure because several roles aren't going to be able to get by with a Chromebook (not something I could see my self doing Scala development on personally).

And then it comes down to, what's the point? You're either already securing your company data and backing it up or you're already using hosted services for everything (Office365, GitHub Enterprise, Dropbox Enterprise, etc)

I agree it seems like more Google lock-in and for something so terribly simple too. I mean except for things like the managed app store, you could just get some really cheap Linux laptops and you'd get the same end result.

Well, from my understanding PWC switched to Google for Business so I guess large corporations are not skittish.[0]

Also, Google does offer support, usually via a third party plus fanstastic Google for Business (G Suite?) support, as well, in my experience.

[0] http://www.pwc.com/us/en/increasing-it-effectiveness/google-...

> ...so I guess large corporations are not skittish.

You're basing that off of a sample size of one?

It is a part of PWC's core business to recommend such changes to their client businesses. Their Google experience could make or break corporate attitudes towards paid Google services.

how about Salesforce, HP, and a few others....

https://gsuite.google.com/customers/

I guess you've described the 4 steps to existing as a company that makes itself known for burning the fuck out of people without recourse - you don't get to have a good reputation in the areas you want.

That user just said "hm, google-something, business-something... eh, no thanks I don't want to get fucked over." Which is inaccurate but that's what happens.

And thus you see the supreme importance of never having the public find out you've ever, even once, locked someone out without recourse.

What about the importance of understanding what a business support agreement is?

Let's say for arguments sake, you have a business support agreement and then it comes out in the news that your business (or maybe just a rogue employee) has done something horribly racist or sexist. Maybe not even racist or sexist, but that something that gets blown out of all proportion and so people think what happened was racist or sexist.

The twitter mobs are baying for your blood. Some Employees inside Google might also be baying for your blood.

Will Google decide to end the business support agreement, and would you bet your business on the answer to that question being 'no'?

Yep. And that's called a reputation.

The company I work for uses Google extensively. Simple stuff like Google Admin is abominably slow, and important things we need like Google Groups are, to be frank, rubbish.

Google Docs is OK, but Google Sheets is abysmal for any serious amount of data. It seems very hard to have Google listen to our concerns.

Interesting. I guess it depends on your definition of "serious amount of data". Our entire accounting system is built on Google Sheets, including about ten thousand transactions in four currencies per financial year. The system summarises by country and cost centre, and has sheets that provide our current profit and loss, and nice things like all the fields in each of the tax forms we have to complete.

OK, we are a small organisation, but I'm happy to recommend Google Sheets to anyone but power users. If you are crunching a lot more data than this, then I certainly agree that using a browser-based spreadsheet is not optimal.

My experience with docs was closer to the parent's. Sheets was fun for having a quick platform to hack out a few things for internal use, but it struggled to remain snappy for our org of about 120 persons. For example we had to start strictly tracking all POs and requests for spending and at first the sheet operation we had was okay, but it suffered once the entire department got to using it.

The admin panel was also horribly slow and just was a pain to work with, especially once we became the target of a long running phishing attack and would have dozens of accounts locked out every day. It was easily a 30 minute process to restore access to cleaned accounts since the panel at the time (2012-2016) didn't have a way of mass management of users.

It's sad I'm being downvoted for speaking about our experience using Google. I work for a major Australian company and we dove right into Google. I'm not entirely negative about it, lots of it is great, but there are still significant gaps.

His comment is relevant as to how would a new product be perceived through the experience had with other products offered by the same company.

Your comment is/was not necessarily relevant to the more political issue of being forcibly removed from having access to your data with absolutely no way of recovering it.

I think you're just being downvoted for being off-topic. This part of the thread's about how trustworthy Google is as a host, and the likelihood of being locked out of your account for some arcane reason, and a discussion of the merits and flaws of their products doesn't fit in smoothly.

Should you really have to pay extra for the privilege of not being locked out?

The problem with destroying trust is that it's really hard to rebuild it.

You can introduce missing pieces and support all you like, but if people think they can't trust you based on your previous history, then it won't make a whit of difference.

yeah... if you count "enterprise" "support" as a "solution" to what they're complaining about.

The comment I'm responding to is literally about questioning how a business could be comfortable using this. What do you want me to say? Do I have the complaint wrong?

There's nothing to say.

"And thus you see the supreme importance of never having the public find out you've ever, even once, locked someone out without recourse."

It says you have 24/7 enterprise support. It doesn't say that your paid accounts will be immune to whatever process is used to shut down a Google account (including Gmail, Hangouts, Blogger, YouTube, etc) without warning or explanation.

Even inside a given service - you think Viacom suddenly stops paying top talent without notice? They at least buy you dinner first.

The comment you responded to is a troll.

At what point do you stop using web browsers in a snit over some corporate bullshit? IE/Edge is MS, Apple does bullshitty things and Firefox is funded by Verizon/OATH.