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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

I think you are giving them too much credit - Microsoft won’t talk to anyone who isn’t a partner and GitHub tends to just be silent on anything they can’t cut and paste an answer to. It’s more an issue that mumbling on about your algorithm and submitting support tickets while bereaved kin desperately seek access to a loved one’s account is just incredibly bad PR and always makes the front page - and nobody wants the job of dealing with that.

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Microsoft will definitely speak to people who aren’t partners - I work for a small business (12 people) and the two times I have had to go to Microsoft for support on 365 they have been incredibly helpful.

That's support you pay for tho. We also were surprised when i worked at a 9 person company to get someone from google on the line too when we were considering using google maps api for a project. Support which wasn't payed for but which I assumes comes from the expectation that we might become a paying customer.

The other side is that with some companies you can’t even pay for support if you wanted. I’m looking at you, Google.

Good luck with getting to Google support if you are paying customer.

"Terraria canceled on Stadia after developer gets locked out of his Google accounts" is just recent example

I disagree. I had an issue last week with the billing platform and contacted support. Was resolved in the same day. I was expecting that I won't get a response (they have millions of users?) but I did. And I'm not a big customer, or a partner or anything that close.

Have to agree with the other commenter here. I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but for organizations who use them that I've helped, I found it relatively straight-forward to get through and talk to someone at Microsoft when needed.

I can testify once you hit a tricky point with GitHub support they're completely useless. And when push comes to shove they'll start playing games - leaving off names in emails so it can't be traced back to a specific employee, sending response that look like they're internal comments, etc. Honestly it was a level of immaturity I didn't expect from GitHub. I went from someone who owned tshirts, hoodies, octopints, etc to someone that only uses them if my work forces me to.

Anecdote: I have an Azure account with a monthly spend of around $100-200 (so, a very small customer). I ran into an issue with Active Directory B2C a couple of years back. I reached out - despite not having a support plan - and ended up with a Microsoft Engineer sharing my screen and helping me fix the issue.

That's not really true in my experience, I've had some issues with quotas being displayed incorrectly on my completely free account recently and got an answer within a few hours, saying that they reset the tracking and relayed a bug report to the team. I honestly think that for now, you can still depend on them to do their due diligence with support.

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