About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.

I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.

Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.

Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.

"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."

Never again.

You still can't actually change your billing country in Office 365 without starting over with a new account. Even support can't do it.

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...

It was bleeding edge tech; that happens.

Well, sure it was bleeding edge. That's not the point. Bleeding edge doesn't mean that your support has to be completely broken like this.

I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”. You can argue it took too long, or that having to give that advice for the reason given is stupid, or that the customer didn’t want to get that advice, but in the example the customer managed to get through to customer support and got clear, actionable advice.

I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.

Sure, "close your account" is actionable, but it's funny to think that it's not a clear sign that their customer support is completely broken. I mean, when you inform a company of a problem and their customer support admits that it's a bug on the company's side, but they can't fix it because they don't have any way to inform the developers from the company in question, how is that not being broken? Customer support should be a filter to the developers, but instead they're a fake door. Despite being a 3rd party, the customer support represents the company. From the customer's side, the company apparently can't communicate with itself. That's completely broken in my book.

> I frequently read worse on HN

Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.

> I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”.

The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.

I have interacted with Apple’s app reviewers for years and never experienced what you’re describing.

It really isn't difficult to search online for stories of people struggling with Apple app reviewers. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

There are people who have a bad experience and they complain about it on the internet. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just adding the opposite data point.

History is that when one one uses bleeding edge; good support and/or reliability is relatively rare. Whether it must be that way or if it's just a bad industry habit can be debated. But, if one looks at the history of most very-new tech, it quite often is not reliable regardless of cause. Therefore, you should probably not assume the newest incarnation will not have this problem. I don't have any solid study, but watching the industry for many decades has shown me this pattern. Here is a common saying that I didn't invent: "Never buy version 1.0". (Wow, I got a -3 above. That hurts.)

Email circa 2010 was not bleeding edge technology.

I can’t speak to Azure, but with a business support plan, it’s really easy to connect with a human on AWS. My experience is that they won’t give up until they resolve your issue. They’ve even gone as far as creating a simplified CloudFormation stack to duplicate the issue and then talk to their developers and get back to you.

Customer obsession is one of Amazon's primary focus. This isn't just for selling merchandise on retail.

I have been using Azure and their support is top notch too.

We're a pretty small fish as Google Cloud clients go, but we have honestly not had this problem at all. We get very fast response to support tickets, and on the rare occasions where we've had to escalate they have gone as far as setting up hangouts with senior engineers.

Google, for all their faults, does seem much more interested in soliciting product feedback.

I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)

(GCP employee)

Yes, totally. When I transferred to work on GCP, I was pleasantly surprised at how much eng/product cares about users/developers wants, needs, and feedback.

If you are above a certain size you don't go through that. The big ones all have more direct access.

Also: Partner companies. They have more direct access too.

I'm not that small a fish as far as GCP customers go and 80% of my support experiences have been ridiculous.

20% have been fabulous, so there's that. I'm also still very fond of GCP as I don't rely on support to operate my service.

I've gotten a prompt response from Google Cloud every time I've filed a support request. Then again, my company pays for a support contract with an SLA.

Yeah, that's the catch.

I've been a gmail/drive/GSuite/Chrome/Android user for a long time and of course I use Google for internet searches. I am getting kind of tired of their bullshit though.

However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.

It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.

Yeah. That has been my experience. AWS has way better customer interaction and will refund "small accidents" with credits. Google makes it hard to reach a person and won't budge at all on similar issues. On the flip side, the documentation on Google Cloud seems a lot better than AWS.

What are you talking about? Just make sure you are someone important on social media and create a tweet stir such that some Google execs look at your problem. That's how you get support.