Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally.

I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems.

I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_.

If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...

Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope.

I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.

I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.

So if your monthly GCP-spending exceeds the salary of 2 engineers, you get access to at least 1.

Sounds great!

GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to.

https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/

https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat

I have no experience with Google support, let alone GCP support. But what I've heard both from inside and from customers, is that unless someone happen to want to help you with your specific problem, it can be a bit of hit or miss situation to get help. Maybe it's different with now GCP, but until I hear first hand experience telling me otherwise, I'm not even considering moving our cloud business to GCP.

We're running production systems making a significant amount of of our revenue, and when, not if, shit hits the fan we need someone with intimate knowledge of the internals to give us undivided attention until it's resolved.

Sometimes it's because we fucked up, sometimes it's the perfect storm of internals working unexpected - all of the time our systems are not working and our customers depend on them for their daily work.

Is this story (which popped up on HN less than a week ago) better service?

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o...

Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out.

Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.

No one likes a poor customer experience. But businesses will always choose a poor customer experience over the risk of a business shutting down.

That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.

It took us about half a year to get billing set up with them. Completely pointless shit show that basically every other company on the planet manages, with Google's own unique weirdness about talking with icky customers.

It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).

Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples.

I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.

This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true.

No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?

> No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing

Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it.

HN is no longer niche.

> Who has the budget for this?

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.

> Who has the budget for this?

Every enterprise, basically.

You subscribe to social media monitoring as a service, they monitor the fire hose and flip on the bat signal as needed.

It’s dirt cheap, relative to not knowing what’s said about you.

> Who has the budget for this?

Ummm, Google(/Alphabet)?

You might have heard of them? Fourth biggest company (by market cap) on the planet? They have budget to do all this shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

Pretty sure they wouldn't even notice the costs of downvoting every single negative comment about them on every single website they're already crawling and mining for keywords and sentiment...

It's possible, but the reputation management people also worry a fair amount about getting caught astroturfing or running bot nets. There are a lot less risky ways of accomplishing the same goal- pushing positive stories, honestly responding, using SEP techniques to get ahead of negative news in search results, etc.

Please educate yourself. Here's just one example. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/samsung-distanc...

> Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon

Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing?

I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.

Same for Facebook. You cannot make any negative comments about react or other Fb tech

What, you mean I could paid for reading and posting HN? Where do I sign up?

The claim of a covert army of astrotufers / reputation management firms was silly when it was made back in the day on Slashdot and it's still silly today. If nothing else, it would never pay well enough for people to keep such a juicy secret.

I keep seeing you blame any downvote you get on external factors. To me it looks like you're just trying to find excuses and cannot accept that people may be downvoting you for legitimate reasons.

Funny enough I just got an email from YoutubeTV last week basically saying the following:

Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years).

Great customer service :-/

Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret