Amazon had better improve its customer service offering, or ramp up its partner network if it wants to win big "enterprisy" clients like government then. The HN crowd may look at the Oracles and IBMs as super-expensive dinosaurs, but they do offer an incredibly high level of help and support.

AWS has excellent customer service offerings after a certain price point. I would check the "Business" and "Enterprise" plans for examples of how to get the good support.

You get an account manager rep and upon occasion, interactions with AWS engineers, depending on what you're doing and how exciting it is.

One might say a lot about AWS - but I don't fault them on the customer service front for a serious business spending serious money.

Amazon already has great customer service for big clients, and they already have lots of government clients too. (Including a completely private region for the CIA and other intelligence services.)

The same applies to Google. Microsoft appears to have the leg up on Oracle & IBM as far as winning "enterprisy" clients.

Ever try getting a SQL support request to an engineer actually at Microsoft and not one outsourced and get a response within weeks? Yeah, not easy. Or if you get a response it's the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and then on again?".

Yes, we had a SQL support case replied to by email, and then followed-up via phone/screenshare to have it resolved that day.

The only constant with tech support is that it's highly variable and depends on many factors. Enterprise MSDN/SQL support is not bad though and you should've gotten a quick reply if you're using the proper channels with an appropriate support plan.

The shop I came from has been a Microsoft and VMware shop for years and we spend millions a year on MSDN licensing. The support has been kinda shitty. But I’m not there anymore. I do remember in DBA meetings laughing about how crappy it is. And why do we pay so much for offshore support techs when they should be local on premises engineers.

Amazon does too when you are well into few mil. per month range they are pretty responsive (used to work for smaller shop 50k/month range spend AWS) the difference is night and day.

Are they? I think Startup customers are very valuable since they are most cost-effective thus providing very good feedbacks.