And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is struggling to make it among that sector.

It's in Google's culture, too. A few years ago when I was learning GCP for a role and wanted to know if they had an AWS Firehose equivalent, I asked on their Slack and the response I got from a GCP rep was "just make a process in Dataflow." Doing that would have cost far, far more than Firehose costs, not to mention the dev/troubleshooting time.

What did you expect the response to be. Should they have said, "No we don't have that, you should probably just use AWS"?

They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a workaround that would solve the problem.

I think the point is obvious, that AWS is far more customer-centric than GCP. Google's gotten better at this but at the time, it seemed to me that GCP was more an amalgam of individual projects developed separately while AWS approached it more from the user's perspective, and that showed in the toolsets available.

I am really trying not to sound like a GCP fanboy, however:

I have never heard anyone say that the AWS toolset was anything but "an amalgam of individual projects developed separately." It is obvious from their UI that the different tools are run by different teams that have very different opinions on how things should be done. Just look at the various iterations of deployment management. ECS vs Lambda vs EKS vs classic EC2. All the UIs have different design standards and assumptions. It has gotten better over the years, but the AWS org chart is still peaking through the UI.

GCP is not much better. At least they had the advantage of starting later in the market cycle. They were able to see what worked and what didn't work at AWS and build a bit cleaner.

In the end we are talking about B2B systems targeting power user engineers. The control surfaces need to be powerful first, and easy to use is a distant second or third consideration.

> Should they have said, "No we don't have that, you should probably just use AWS"?

Yes? If you can't trust your rep to give accurate recommendations, then what's the point of even having one?

They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.

If you have no problems, it's fine. The first time you need to call customer support, you start wondering if TMobile or somebody else would be a better provider.

> They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.

On that note - I have AT&T. I'm fine with AT&T, except that group MMS / messaging is broken with non-iPhone users. I've tried calling support, walking into a store, and now - simply given up. I tried two other carriers a few years ago, and had far worse problems, so I just suck it up and call people when we have to communicate. At least that part works.

You sum it up well.

This bit me after switching from Mint to Verizon. I thought it was the Verizon's fault for a long time, but Reset All Settings on my iPhone finally fixed it.

https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/switched-to-verizon-iphone-...

Huh. That rather ominous reset option did it. Why thank you kind stranger. :-)

What an excellent analogy.

Google is AT&T: technically great, but customer support is intentionally and aggressively incompetent.

AWS is Verizon: technically good with some weird rough edges and legacy stuff, but customer support will bend over backwards for you.

Does that mean Azure is T-mobile? I have little experience with either.

Yeah, the clients are different - Microsoft and IBM target enterprise clients and they know that if a client can't reach someone on the phone, they will lose their business. Google on the other hand is a business-to-consumer business trying now to be a business-to-business one, and still thinks that it can ignore the "older" generation and target the current generation who are more familiar with interacting with automated response systems. It's already biting them in the arse.