But why? Per OP - they'd be willing to pay for an enterprise support contract. Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE?
It's one thing to tell people using a free service that their only option is automated support - it's quite another to tell customers you just flat-out refuse to offer a paid support model. That tells me that you are organizationally deficient at providing customer support. I've yet to hear anyone using paid g suite speak praises about their support experience if they ever have issues. Quite the opposite.
Well, for one thing, everyone you ask except apparently the HN comment section will tell you.
I've probably seen this exact conversation play out 10+ times now. Someone says that GCP has poor customer support by analogy to other, mostly free services. Someone who actually uses GCP customer support claims that this is not the case. Some third (or perhaps the original) person blows them off and insists that Google's behavior toward the statistically adversarial and free users of other services must be representative of Google's behavior toward an entirely different group of users.
It's baffling.
Not to mention that I have had rocky issues with GCP as well. There was documentation that lied about its caching behavior, cost me over $1000 of my personal money, they took over a year to fix the bug and offered no reimbursement. Maybe I'm a small fry and don't deserve support, but this is the kind of customer management that Google is absolutely terrible at.
You go to a restaurant, try a dish and it gives you food poisoning. Do you have to go back and try every single item on the menu? The other ones might be great, but realistically you probably go to a different restaurant after that.
It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last.
I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
Maybe that's the case, but I can't see it. Cloud computing is such a huge business, it doesn't take more than a third-place position to make more money than say, Youtube. Some random article [1] has GCP's 2019 Q4 revenue at $2.6B compared to Youtube at $4.7B, and total revenue in the cloud market is definitely going up way faster than total revenue in the advertising market. Plus, the "Google sucks at products" narrative is based on a reputation that people at Google would much rather be building technology than products. Cloud computing seems like the perfect match for such a reputation. App Engine is almost as old as AWS, and looks very much like it started as an excuse to have something for Guido Van Rossum to do.
> I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple.
> So why doesn't the Android experience compare?
It came out in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit that Android had only made Google something like $10B since it started. So GCP is already making something like 10x what Android makes, and given cellphone saturation this will likely only grow.
> But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
AWS has a whole pile of services that you can tell no longer get any attention, or in some cases, even have full time staff anymore. Services that still aren't integrated with CloudFormation after years and years because clearly nobody cares. A guarantee that the lights stay on and the service continues to handle requests is the most you can ask or get from any of the existing cloud providers.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-revenue-first-t...
That’s also a wrong assumption. Android devs may very well be paid GCP customers if they had a great experience with the Android platform.
I am not talking about only full stack solo developers, I am also talking about companies with mobile apps with backend needs.
Their support is downright AWFUL. Getting someone from Google to help is so challenging that they have decided that in order to work with them on their enterprise offerings you must go through a 3rd party vendor. Their third party vendors are all small companies with which my organization has very little trust for.
I will never knowingly try to do anything with Google again after the hellish experience I have had dealing with them and their vendors so far, it just isn't worth it.
Free Android app developers
We're not going to be the biggest fish, but our spend is approaching $1mio per year. If you spend more than that and have a TAM YMMV.
You just described their problem. You pay them money, whatever they ask, and are shocked that e human provided support to you
I understand Google heavily rewards new product launches with promotions. Is that part of company culture not at all within the GCP org? I don't know, I'm asking.
People aren't conflating GCP with the rest of Google. They're just unaware of any markedly different promotion incentives in that org.
"I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".
Trust is trust, and if amazon can't be trusted to behave well in one context, over time, that erodes people's trust in the platform to behave well in other contexts. Thats what's going on with Google - they killed reader, and it's the same company, why are we magically expecting different behavior in cloud?
It might not be warranted, but that's irrelevant. Trust is earned, and Google isn't entitled to it, they have to earn it. Doesn't matter how they lost it, market forces are market forces, they need to get it back
This is actually a good argument. I can easily imagine that this could become a problem for Amazon in the future.
"Amazon continues to allow counterfeits to pervade. I cannot trust them with anything important."
I feel exploited. I feel like I am the product. This might work when providing a free service to the public but we, developers, are not the general public.
As condescending and cliche as it may sound, we don't like our time wasted. Google's free services should be a magnet to entice, a funnel to capture and channel our hearts and minds, not the developer repellant they have become.
The fact that someone has to spell this is out is a testament to how out of touch Google has become with its traditional base - developers.
Of course it affects GCP, because due to their existing reputation, people think “Google has not cancelled any GCP product yet”
You have to be kidding me. Their payed support is terrible. We recently had a problem with occasional timeouts contacting the GCE container registry which causes our autoscaling groups to sometimes fail to start new nodes.
I shit you not but this one of the selected support answers (after many prior back and forth). Obviously, this issue is still ongoing after many days.
"Thank you for your information.
I have searched our internal documentation about any service outage and any network issues open recently, And so far I can’t find any explanation of your issue.
However, I found the following instruction [1] where describe how to run a local copy of the Google Docker Registry.
In addition, also attached the docs where described about how to set up a private Docker registry [2].
If above instruction does not work then please let me know and I will be happy to help you.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27243294/unable-to-pull-... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
Seriously? Run a private registry? We don't run a private registry because we don't want to deal with that stuff.
https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...
You've really hit the nail on the head for me there. The people I really respect are the people who can look at idea a and say "that's failing because it's a bad idea" and look at idea b and say "that's a good idea, but we need to work harder at it". Google (from the outside) appears to say "These are all ideas, and they failed, kill them". There's no understanding or insight into the world, there's only 'experiments', which is as good as throwing a random number generator at an authentication system.
One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will abandon anything they launch.
Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and just ended up tricking it through trial and error.