I have to agree with you rubynOObie. My former company was a big Rackspace customer, over 8? years, in their top tier dedicated environment (Intensive or somesuch they called it). I too really wanted to believe in their "Fanatical Support", primarily because we were shelling out $$k+/mo, but there were way too many mistakes on their side to ever believe it. If they couldn't do it with hardware/OS support, why would I believe they could do it with complex application support?
Our relationship became so toxic that they flew me down to SA for some customer appreciation event. Which oddly enough, was about 50% new happy customers, and 50% disgruntled existing customers. And boy was my experience with their support reinforced repeatedly by the others...
Not to mention I went through more than dozen "dedicated" account teams. They were all so earnest at first, but by the time I left, I had basically scripted the conversation for a new account team, pointing out all the custom things on our account and with our configuration that they absolutely couldn't mess with under penalty of death.
Their dedicated pricing is non-competitive these days... I think they rely on the fact that once you're past a certain size, moving to another provider would be so painful that you'll happily pay their ridiculous rates.
In our (Rackspace) defense I will say that we definitely don't rely on a customer getting bigger and being stuck with us as a result due to migration pains. I can demonstrate that logically if you will follow:
Surely this audience is aware of OpenStack and our commitment to such having open source the first major components a few years ago. With such knowledge you can logically assume that we want to be interoperable with other companies' offerings on the same platform.
We really believe in this "fanatical support" thing and we believe we can compete with others on a fair playing field because of it. We do this in part by paying attention:
If our support fails in areas and it's made public in places like this website, trust we are reading about it and discussing it at various levels. Furthermore, we are always striving to get it right. Take that from someone who isn't paid to read this, but paid to write software.
FTR, these are my opinions as someone in the Rackspace culture. Take it for what its worth.
Tell us what we suck at so we can do it better (like you did, drfritznunkie). Thanks.
Our relationship became so toxic that they flew me down to SA for some customer appreciation event. Which oddly enough, was about 50% new happy customers, and 50% disgruntled existing customers. And boy was my experience with their support reinforced repeatedly by the others...
Not to mention I went through more than dozen "dedicated" account teams. They were all so earnest at first, but by the time I left, I had basically scripted the conversation for a new account team, pointing out all the custom things on our account and with our configuration that they absolutely couldn't mess with under penalty of death.
Their dedicated pricing is non-competitive these days... I think they rely on the fact that once you're past a certain size, moving to another provider would be so painful that you'll happily pay their ridiculous rates.