Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet.
But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place.
Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics.
And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented.
Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact.
And that surely the complete opposite of customer service.
Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA.
And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.
It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.
Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job
I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.
In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.
Give me AWS support any day
On top of that AWS documentation is often both needlessly opaque, elliptical, incomplete, and outdated or otherwise incorrect.
On the other hand, if the issue isn't too obscure, AWS’s huge marketshare means that you can usually find decent answers on SO.
You essentially have to be a systems engineer/sysadmin for every one of your customers with only as much context as your customer is willing to share.
I like my job, but please have mercy on support.
The reason Google support has a hard time of it is Google doesn't offer that model to all its customers, just the ones that can pay a lot of money. But support still has the job of helping everyone else (with all the challenges you've described that such entails).
Their zeitgeist appears to be "Other companies needed to provide that because their technology was wrong / incomplete. We'll just build things right instead."
Which is batshit insane, in the same way that expecting a veterinary pharmacist could prescribe for humans... with better technology.
Contrast that with AWS, where I had 4 engineers (back when our bill was 12k/year) helping us with recommending certain arquitectures and actively being useful anytime we reach out.
Our AWS expenses tripled because of growth and us choosing them for new components while our GCP expenses have remained flat.
Amounts like 30k/year may not sound big to many folks, but when you go to a truly good SaaS organization and spend that kind of cash, you get excellent support (online or offline). Google has absolutely amazing services that for the most part do not require human support, but for the times that you actually do, it is simply non-existant.
It may be because we're an attractive customer with a very large amount of AWS spend, but the folks at GCP have made our adoption pretty amazing. We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services, in addition to onsite training/consultation with experts (all paid for by Google).
I've had to use support a couple of times and found it pretty on par with support I've gotten out of AWS.
Like any provider of services, I've found that relationships are key. Cultivating a good relationships with your reps/contacts goes a long way in their willingness to go the extra mile for you.
But, interactions with our reps have grown fewer (we're told their customer success/technical account management teams are understaffed), and it may be a sign that we're getting out of the honeymoon phase. We'll see.
As have we. But that should ring a few alarm bells in regards to scalability and whether that can continue.
Google should just cut IBM's support org (the older, experienced folks) off the carcass, retrain them, and use them as a cadre for building their own org.
AWS frequently will communicate detailed, specific technical workarounds and instructions via email on the free support plan. I’ve reached out to GCP support and the best I’ve ever received was a link to a generic support document.
AWS does give 1-1 support to smaller clients, and you can also pay extra to get actual phone help. The OP may or may not have had direct experience with this but his criticisms ring true with mine.
The point is that that doesn't matter. Even if it's not always logical, the reputation of your company as a whole sometimes matters, even in the case of corporate accounts ("nobody got fired for buying IBM" after all). Moreso in the case of startups where you have one tech guy who might have gotten burned before.
Amazon has a stellar reputation since nearly everyone has gotten a refund from Amazon for some cheap DOA $2 cable but meanwhile Google stonewalled them on some random glitch in Gmail. Even if it's not logical, those things stick around in people's heads.
That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.
One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).
No, I don't think there really is.
With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.
Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure.
To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.
That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer.
...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams.
The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.
A healthy company mines the hell out of it for feature discovery and product improvement.
These people are literally continually talking to your customers about what their actual pain points are!
I completely disregard any documentation or information older than 2019, and I'm a bit suspicious if it is from the first half of the year, that is how often they change things for no apparent reason.
Their support will likely try to convince you to rewrite your app with their latest stack than solve obvious issues with Azure.
The only positive thing about the whole ecosystem is that support and evangelists/presales will likely admit bugs and share workarounds they've used. For example deploying AKS from the portal has a 50% chance of failing because it will not have created the service principle before something else requires it - so they will recommend creating the service principal in advance and selecting it in the config.
Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform.
Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though.
Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.