5 ms·

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.

itsthejb 5mo ago
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
- mothballed 5mo ago
  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.
  - jack_pp 5mo ago
    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.
    - cwnyth 5mo ago
      I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.
    - cwnyth 5mo ago
      I went a-looking and found a very old website of mine: https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalgia.com/comp/c.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalg... You can see all the C fora I frequented. A later snapshot of this website pointed to EFNet. Good times.
  - hluska 5mo ago
    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.
    - mothballed 5mo ago
      You're absolutely right. "Back in the day" (looking at your account, it was created in the 2010s), roughly 2010-2020, was the high water mark for politically correct moral proselytizing. Your kind has lost the plot, your lies disinfected by the sunlight, and society is progressing back towards tolerating a bit more candid and colorful language. This is especially true with the latest generation who saw the effects of this overly paranoid policing of speech. It's a glorious thing. I am absolutely taking advantage of the fact that I can speech more freely nowadays.
GenerWork 5mo ago
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?
- snaking0776 5mo ago
  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.
awesome_dude 5mo ago
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model
ricw 5mo ago
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.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
- strictnein 5mo ago
  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.
  - rrr_oh_man 5mo ago
    $100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mjcl 5mo ago
      At least AWS will send people out to your office to tell you which services you aren't using but could.
  - iammrpayments 5mo ago
    I heard facebook is even worse
    - rhettsnaps 5mo ago
      Facebook = Faceless Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees TikTok = TimeWaste Robinhood = Rob The Hood OpenAI = ClosedAI
bonesss 5mo ago
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>
kryogen1c 5mo ago
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.
- xico 5mo ago
  Google and Meta are both Advertising companies. If we want to decrease a tiny bit the insane imbalance in societies we need to have a strong discussion about taxing advertising.
- lmm 5mo ago
  > 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.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  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
  - evan_a_a 5mo ago
    place this alongside the classic "mcdonalds is a real estate investment firm"
- the_other 5mo ago
  Today? Not 23 years ago (approx) when they started scanning emails?

itsthejb 5mo ago

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

mothballed 5mo ago
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.
- jack_pp 5mo ago
  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.
  - cwnyth 5mo ago
    I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.
  - cwnyth 5mo ago
    I went a-looking and found a very old website of mine: https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalgia.com/comp/c.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalg... You can see all the C fora I frequented. A later snapshot of this website pointed to EFNet. Good times.
- hluska 5mo ago
  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.
  - mothballed 5mo ago
    You're absolutely right. "Back in the day" (looking at your account, it was created in the 2010s), roughly 2010-2020, was the high water mark for politically correct moral proselytizing. Your kind has lost the plot, your lies disinfected by the sunlight, and society is progressing back towards tolerating a bit more candid and colorful language. This is especially true with the latest generation who saw the effects of this overly paranoid policing of speech. It's a glorious thing. I am absolutely taking advantage of the fact that I can speech more freely nowadays.

GenerWork 5mo ago

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?

snaking0776 5mo ago
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.

awesome_dude 5mo ago

In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model

ricw 5mo ago

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.

PunchyHamster 5mo ago
Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
strictnein 5mo ago
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.
- rrr_oh_man 5mo ago
  $100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mjcl 5mo ago
    At least AWS will send people out to your office to tell you which services you aren't using but could.
- iammrpayments 5mo ago
  I heard facebook is even worse
  - rhettsnaps 5mo ago
    Facebook = Faceless Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees TikTok = TimeWaste Robinhood = Rob The Hood OpenAI = ClosedAI

bonesss 5mo ago

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>

kryogen1c 5mo ago

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.

xico 5mo ago
Google and Meta are both Advertising companies. If we want to decrease a tiny bit the insane imbalance in societies we need to have a strong discussion about taxing advertising.
lmm 5mo ago
> 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.
dijksterhuis 5mo ago
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
- evan_a_a 5mo ago
  place this alongside the classic "mcdonalds is a real estate investment firm"
the_other 5mo ago
Today? Not 23 years ago (approx) when they started scanning emails?