Google has a real trust issue with me that's twofold.
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.
Google absolutely needs to fix their trust problem, but it is also completely wrong to compare support between their paid GCP customers vs their mostly free Android app developers.
Fwiw, I recently called Google customer support to fix a billing problem and was pleasantly surprised that I talked to a real human quickly, AND they were able to resolve my problem and issue a refund. So maybe they are improving on that end too.
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.
> 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?
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.
The point is not that it must be, the point is that if you've burned your bridges once before, you're going to have a hard time selling again. If I've been screwed once by Google (and I have been, multiple times), selling me GCP has to overcome those trust issues.
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.
I don't know why you find it baffling. I've tried to use GSuite customer support (as a paid-for customer) and found it terrible. Why would I roll the dice and GCP a try given I might have had concerns about support for other products in the past?
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.
This is not what I'm talking about. A data point that GSuite has poor customer support is actually useful! GSuite and GCP are bundled together on Google's financial reports, and probably overlap a lot in customer support expectations since they both handle paying customers. So someone sharing their perspective that GSuite has poor customer support is contributing to the discussion. It's infinitely more valuable that then 9000th iteration of "Remember how Google killed Google Reader?"
To give you the depth of my misgiving here, I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider. Maybe they won't kill GCP, but I could easily see them gradually lowering their focus until I would regret having built anything on it.
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.
> I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider.
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.
I use Fi, when it was Project Fi they had great support. Now it is Google Fi and my last interaction with their support was bad enough that I am ready to switch. I would never trust Google with my business.
I work at Lyft and have to work directly with Google on several of their various enterprise offerings.
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.
Google Ads and GSuite, which are paid products, have terrible customer support in my experience. Maybe our account was not big enough? With AWS, just the opposite: knowledgeable and fast. Was even able to put in feature requests.
Google payed support for GCE is absolutely embarrassingly terrible. To get to someone who knows what they are talking about you have to go through many many people who have zero clue, over frustrating course of many days. Every.single.time.
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.
Neither of these concerns affect Google Cloud Platform. 1) Google has not cancelled any GCP product that I know of, and 2) GCP has excellent support with fast SLA-timed responses from support personnel. Additionally, Google, the org., recently decided to redouble efforts to grow GCP.
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.
Yeah that's legitimate. "Amazon doesn't care enough to make sure counterfeits are struck down, continuing to put people at risk. Why wouldn't that corporate culture and lack of concern for the well being of the customer transfer over to AWS? What if I'm hosting with someone that'll leave big security holes or oversell capabilities just to drive sales at the expense of quality?"
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
I think that doesn't weight as much in people's opinion because the counterfeit problem only came uo in the last couple years. AWS hat already a good reputation by then.
Yep. Amazon search has built that trust of Amazon (although plenty of retail companies refuse to use AWS because of the retail competition). But there was a time when Google was universally the coolest company in the room - and I'd be interested to see how deep the trust well goes with amazon. The one thing with amazon you can trust is that they want to make money, and cloud makes them money, so they're at least not gonna pull the plug on you.
This was an issue - SES email deliverability out of Amazon was poor for a while before they got their head straight around supporting spammers. Haven't kept up, but it may still be lower than folks paying more attention despite amazon's size and skill.
It's not just about GCP and cancelations. By now I associate Google with high maintenance, constant and unnecessary change (great for Google, but nothing in it for me), no maintenance and bugfixes, and neverending re-writes.
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.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's absolutely valid. Trust is trust, and if you can't trust the organization to behave in the correct way in one situation why would you expect them to behave in a correct way and a different situation if it's the same organization? Same culture same compensation. they're not entitled to trust, they have to earn it, and it doesn't matter how they lost it, it's their job to get it back, not ours to see the good in their hearts or whatever
"GCP has excellent support with fast SLA-timed responses from support personnel"
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.
These concerns do affect the platform since clearly on HN, a technical forum, the trust issues engineers have with Google are a serious consideration. Sure they haven't cancelled anything yet, the concern though is that very few people have faith that Google won't cancel things in the future.
>They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world.
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.
Where GP claims that Google "doesn't have the sales team nor the experience in building one", it seems like an Oracle exec would be a perfect fit, because for all the hate levied against Oracle, for all sorts of reasons, it seems like enterprise sales is something they're quite good at.
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.