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Comment by samlinnfer | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft (Office365) here but it actually has a track record of actually having support, support people that you can talk on the phone with and knows how to navigate the dark corners of their convoluted systems and actually solved my problems (even if it was caused by Microsoft's horrific UI in the first place).

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An article here a couple of days ago said that the automation behind the scenes in Azure is piss poor and the whole thing is held together by thousands of contractors manually fixing the endless failures.

On the plus side, it does mean they have thousands of people who know how to fix problems.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

At Google there is one guy who knows how to fix the problem.. he's a monk who is also in 700 different teams and the only one who remembers how the systems were built. You have to climb all the way up to his mountain abode, hope that he is home and pray that he will hear your cries and help you

There's a long queue up that mountain, though.

Any painful automation story feels very different from their customer service. MS has always been superior to their competition with customer service - especially paid service contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late (and reluctantly) to them.

> MS has always been superior to their competition with customer service - especially paid service contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late (and reluctantly) to them.

If we're comparing cloud services, surely GCP has customer service? I can't imagine any big enterprise using it otherwise.

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