> My experience is that Google services are often an order of magnitude harder to use than competitors.

Huh, I think most people feel the exact opposite, especially with the comparison between AWS and GCP. GCP has lots of services that are really easy to get set up and running easily by a small Dev shop (Firebase is pretty fantastic in my opinion), while with AWS unless you have some DevOps/networking experts it's a lot harder to do things correctly and securely.

If anything, I think the biggest issue with GCP is they still don't have the "DNA" to do enterprise support at the level large companies expect, while AWS does.

> I think the biggest issue with GCP is they still don't have the "DNA" to do enterprise support at the level large companies expect, while AWS does.

You nailed it. Coming from 8-years of AWS and working on GCP for the last 4, enterprise support is the BIGGEST differentiator IMO between AWS and GCP. GCP's services are usually technical advanced sooner (encryption architecture, various of compliances certification, etc.) and more developer friendlier, their support is absolutely the worst in the industry, opaque, slow and hard to reach, just like the support from any other Google consumer facing products. Google has never been a consumer friendly technology company, probably never will. This is in dire contrast with Amazon, which Bezos claim it always has been a customer focused business.

Well I wouldn't say their consumer facing products are bad. We've spend $70mil a year with them for google ads and I would say their support for Ads are fantastic.

Google's quality of support tends to correlate strongly with how much money you pay them. They treat their large advertisers very well, but for that very same product, support under $1mil/year is pretty bad, and that's actually still quite a bit of spend.

True. AWS enterprise support varies based not on how much money you spent on the account but rather how much money you opt-in on the support tier - the top tier support contract is expensive but AWS really treats you like a partner with prompt updates on the issue resolution, sometimes live support over the phone to tell you how to debug and identify issues.

What about Google support? Nada. They don't even have a direct phone number to reach (requests are sent via email). There are issues that they completely dropped the ball on and provide no updates whatsoever or reluctant to look into or to put a closure on. Day and night difference. (We weren't a $1MM account in terms of total annual GCP spending just yet, we very well could be in the next years I hope.)

yeah completely agree.

That's not a consumer product, that's their core business. Also you need to spend over 1M/month to get any real support.

My experience, and the experience of everyone I've talked to, is that Google support is amazing if you pay for it, and nearly non-existent if you don't.

You may check this Single API to a bunch of visual recognition services, in case you still need it: https://inten.to/api-platform/ai/image/tagging

I think GCP for plain infra stuff is complicated, but so is AWS. They’re about the same to me, but AWS seems to have vastly more features.