Comment by Master_Odin
1 day ago
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
1 day ago
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
> They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.
netflix is tv/film licensing. [0]
facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]
contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.
welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.
[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)
[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised
Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.
If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.
$100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".
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Even if you spend a crazy amount of money with them for advertising they will try to gaslight you if they make a mistake.
I heard facebook is even worse
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Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.
It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.
To this day I still try to use Google as little as possible all because they killed Google Reader
Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.
It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.
Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.
Is that reason customer service? My only experiences with AWS along those lines have not been great...
Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.
Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
In the good old days of 2011 when I started to learn C++ "for real" I did it using learncpp.com, google and "support" from freenode's #c++ where truly masterful wizards would help me with the most inane questions. I don't think anything I've ever found has come close to freenode's level of "support".
In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.
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Back in the day, comments like this would not have been acceptable here. It’s low brow, unbelievably stupid, adds absolutely nothing and yet still manages to make you sound just a little racist. Good for you, all that on less than fifty words.
When you mention it, providing superlative front line customer support sounds like a perfect fit for organizations selling “AI” solutions…
Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model