Most recently, I filed a support ticket online and my phone rang a few minutes later. On the other end was an MS support rep who stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes, including a screen share, until my issue was resolved. At the end of the call he left me with his direct # and email, and said that I could contact him directly with any future inquiries.
Really can't ask for much more than that.
We've all heard about the horror stories that it doesn't matter what you do with Google you cannot get human support unless you get to the top of HN or Reddit.
MS are totally different, they offer support for every service, you just have to pay for it. I think they also offer different levels of support, some of our programmers at a previous (small) company could talk to the Silverlight team over problems they were having after it just came out.
Funnily enough, when I google "google paid support" the top result is this little (frightening) gem:
http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
Compare that to this, "microsoft paid support":
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/services/en-id
I'm in no way affiliated with MS, actually use Google Apps myself.
You can find it here: http://support.google.com/a/bin/request.py
I just went their with my free apps account and it's not exactly forthcoming about how either.
MS engineers complain about all the bureaucracy involved in change anything - check with legal, update user docs, update support docs, update the tests, check the internationalization and accessibility. But that's the cost of providing a solid product.
Google has two big products - ads and search. Search is more or less a single text box, and a list of results. There's some bells and whistles, but as long as you can type in a search box it's good enough. Ads are similarly bullet proof (though plenty of people get pissed off at being blacklisted).
I worked for a Gold partner at the time. Now I work for a company that buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of Microsoft software, and while I'm not in contact with support, I hear they've also done well by us. They even do special patches if needed.
OTOH one of the biggest retail companies here tried a companywide rollout of Google Apps for businesses and discarded it mainly because of the lack of support.
Of course, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be working on ways to identify those very rare issues that need manual intervention and provide ways to get the support you need at that point, but that may only be 1 case in 100,000 or so.
Low price doesn't mean that you can never afford any service. I received a personal response/apology and vouchers from a marketing representative once after I complained by e-mail about a €2,99 food product (Iglo brand).
Google is either just greedy and reckless, or their prices are below the cost of the actual product (with no support costs factored in), but even then they could afford some level of support. But hey, if they get away with it, no big deal, right?
(Edit: another example, I have a €0,90 per month e-mail account from df.eu and receive personal, thoughtful reponses when I ask them about technical issues like TLS support - how is a much smaller company able to do that and Google isn't? It's obviously not the product price.)
Google has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and supporting anything other than their ad products doesn't make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. I'd wager that most google products lose money, and I'm almost certain that GV is unprofitable.
Is this morally correct? That depends on ones value system. Google tells customers that they don't provide support and users continue to consume the service. If you want support, the price tag is higher than free.99.
That level of service, as a consumer, means so much to me.
Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.
The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.
That said, some Internet companies--I'd add eBay in my experience, Facebook also based on lots of stories--use huge amounts of automation and just don't seem to have the processes (and likely the staffing) to resolve problems with competent individual attention when a person has to intervene. It's partly a matter of scale but Amazon, for example, seems to do a much better job overall.
All it takes is spending a significant amount of money with them, year after year...
I remember working one place that had that in place, and we hit an REALLY odd SQL Server bug (or, atleast it appeared to be a bug to us). We had top level support in place, but only had X per year, and no one would authorize us to use it just yet - "keep working on it for a bit, see if you can figure out a solution", because they didn't want to "waste" one of the calls if it turned out to be our mistake.
MS is in a weirder position, because offering direct support would cut out a lot of the consultants and ecosystem which they've trained/certified. You're expected to engage those people for support (although... they didn't write the software, so how they'd 'fix' something if it went wrong...?) Google has no such ecosystem to point to.
Yes, who would choose a bank for your critical banking needs (or a vehicle company for fleet management, etc) where your primary or only means of support was random forum postings that were staffed by volunteer workers who had no authority to fix things?
I tend to think this state of affairs evolved out of earlier beliefs that computers were "hard" and had some sort of black magic mystique around them.
Overall, I've only worked at a few 'big' companies (more than 20 people) and was continually frustrated when requests of mine were framed as 'coming from a tech' or 'you don't understand business', which these sorts of requests tended to fall under.
In a nutshell, someone else got to choose tech XYZ, but didn't have to work with it. The people charged with using it are not given any authority to actually contact the vendor to fix the problem (or, in some cases, buy proper training or even get reimbursed for books on the subject). And somehow this is "good business"?
Few other departments in a large company would put up with this BS. Imagine the following scenario:
"Hey legal department, you're not allowed to buy a subscription to LexisNexis - just dig around on a forum for 8 weeks piecing together a defense. Oh, and by the way, we already set up the subsidiary in Brazil - forgot to tell you earlier. Just learn Spanish - I found this website where you can download Rosetta Stone for free. Anyway, Spanish is pretty easy - my son's already taken two classes in high school and took at trip to Mexico!"
"Java/JavaScript" is the worst, but I'm sure we've all encountered others.
There is one call you can mostly disregard: the smart guy with too much time on his hands who wants your product to be his custom design for free.
Welcome to HN though.
Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.
And yes moving mail out of Gmail was a pain because of the weird IMAP structure they use.
But with Google and Microsoft, there is no support department. You need to know how a specific service is charged? Good luck. You need to know why a needed parameter is missing on their API documentation? Forget it.
Basically companies like Google and Microsoft want to toss their products out into the wild and then go back behind closed doors to noodle on something else. It baffles me as to why enterprise businesses are able to do this.