^^^ spot on. My thought while reading the article was how poor Google’s sales and customer support culture is across the entire company that has led to non-tech firms picking solutions with Azure and AWS who invest heavily on the support side.
I was operating a fairly large AWS operation, and had the idea to at least check with G Cloud if they were interested (usually you get a boatload of free credits to startups).
After 3 emails spread over several months I eventually got a note saying I should expect to talk with my Google Cloud salesguy, but it can only happen over a Hangout. And not any hangout - they sent a cheap ass Android "netbook" that I had to physically go to the post office to get, that the Hangout call was supposed to happen through.
I did get it from the post office, noted that it took minutes to start up, then gave it away and never heard from GC again.
No, I'm sure they could have accepted any Hangouts call or being coerced into accepting a phonecall as well.
But truthfully what they wrote in the sendout was like I described - they outlined the procedure to go get the netbook and use it and at no point did they suggest a physical phone number to call or similar. I went along with it as far as I did just because I was kind of baffled by the suggested procedure :)
I assume it was part of some marketing scheme to try to market Hangouts and/or Chromebooks (or whatever it was) at the same time as GCP, but it just confused the sale and added unnecessary pain-points. The AWS guys just send an email and let me call them by a normal phone.
I think AWS is also going to start seriously suffering from their terrible billing experience pretty soon. I think I can see the beginnings of the damage showing up in how many HOWTOs and retrospectives are out there about unexpected AWS charges, but I don't think it's caused a noticeable impact for them yet.
Not just their billing, but their terrible interface. I shouldn't have to ctrl f everytime I want to check ec2 instances. Whoever decided to show 200+ "services" on a single screen is a crazy person.
At the company level of conversation, the UI of AWS services isn't that big of a deal. The people with budget authority usually don't even see the AWS UI and have most likely never logged in.
