Google's services are so perfect they don't even need to invest in customer service!
If you have a problem with anything, it's clearly your fault and you're doing it wrong. /s
If you have a problem with anything, it's clearly your fault and you're doing it wrong. /s
It’s hard to overstate how important this level of close support is for an enterprise that is literally betting the farm on a cloud provider. The idea of counting on Google’s historical level of support is an absolute non-starter for us.
They've never tried to deeply understand our use cases or business at all. Hopefully they turn this around but IMO, Google is absolutely horrible at B2B, they're just not currently set up to do it correctly.
In the large enterprise migrations I've worked on the past 2 years, I haven't heard a Google employee or partner say, "you're doing it wrong." Sometimes there is a response along the lines of, "we don't recommend doing it that way for the following specific reasons. For your consideration, here are alternatives we recommend for your use case. We've filed your use case as a feature request with product."
Additionally, I've seen issues which block a migration to GCP get escalated and fixed quickly. Issues which in ~2015 might have garnered a, "you're doing it wrong" response.
I've noticed a real shift in attitude and execution. There is genuine empathy and an attempt to understand how enterprise customers run their workloads in the cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud.
I know of only 2 colleagues who've looked at GCP. Both are medium-large financial institutions. Both said they had very little human-to-human contact with Google representatives. In one case they chose AWS instead; the other is still evaluating GCP.
It's interesting that other posts in the thread are complimentary about the quality of the GCP products. I can believe that; Google has built its fair share of impressive technology. But I see no evidence of an enterprise supplier I could trust: one that would be there to help out when the world went belly up. Given that, it doesn't matter how good their products are.
I'd actually like to see GCP being successful. As well as bringing some competition and diversity to the market, it would give Google a more honest and above-board revenue stream than ads. I don't see that happening though, at least not without a change in leadership.
What!! So I paid $50 for one month for support, and got a full on support expert who'd bill (at least in my world) $250+/hr. Honestly, the support cost was maybe even LOWER, and I'd just signed up for support to submit my ticket.
Google does not care. You GSuite calendar is not accessible on google home devices etc etc despite TONS of requests from paying customers. That same calendar integrates easily with ALEXA from amazon. Huh? Someone is paying attention, and it's not google.
I do like project based permission / approach in GCP. I like a lot of other things there too. But I've had stuff running for years on AWS without issue - so the trust with AWS keeping things going mostly is there.