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.
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.