111–120 of 238 posts
Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company that provides products to consumers and then supports them. There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.
What are the odds this suddenly actually gets attention when it hits the front page? Do you really have to publicly shame a company into action?
Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company that provides products to consumers and then supports them. There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.
I've found Google Fi to have exceptionally good support, and the same is true with Nexus phones - a very painless RMA process when something didn't work quite right.
Thanks for sharing the story. Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because: 1. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a good chunk of ti…
Depends on company culture. I would expect that a Googler would get into some trouble (at the very least step on some toes, though that might be warranted in this situation) if they basically cut out the team this particular bug was triaged to. Probably better to escalate internally and have the engineers actually responsible for fixing the bug have it made a higher priority.
The only case where I can imagine someone getting into trouble would be if they spent a ton of time fixing a random bug when they're meant to be working on something else, and it resulted in something important getting held up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my annoyance with the OP - they're a very clear edge case and, technically, the product still works for them. They're not paying for a Windows or Mac app, they're paying for online storage and that part of the service works fine. They can still access all their files via the web browser and they can add and download files as they see fit. The issue with the app is probably exactly what you're mentioning and t…
No, Google Drive is sold as a customer-facing service and customers have a basic expectation that it will do what it says on the box. If the Dropbox application didn't run, I'd be pissed too, even if it does happen to be "online storage". If someone was complaining that an Amazon S3 application was broken, that would be a different story.
> https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit
They claim a limit of around 300,000 files - this user apparently has 700,000 files.
The Google sync client doesn't have a hard limit per se, but yes, the performance does similarly decline after a certain point - it depends on a number of factors, but it's possibly at 700,000 that you would see issues. It should be able to comfortably handle 300,000 though.
In fact, most Desktop sync clients experience similar things.
I do know this is something we're aware of and are actively improving. In fact, we have a new Backup and Sync client that we announced recently and should be going GA shortly.
There's no details I have to contact this specific customer to see if I can intercede, but if anybody knows, please comment here.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but any comments above are my own).
Thanks for sharing the story. Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because: 1. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a good chunk of ti…
The problem with this is that the client now has your direct contact information. If you help them out, then you can bet the next time they have an issue they are coming straight to you rather than going through official channels. If they work at large customer your contact may get passed around within their company and you run the risk of being overwhelmed or having to start directly turning down requests for help. You really don't want to be in that situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"scaling support" almost always seems hand in hand with "dumbing down for lowest common denominator". By the time things have made it through "please restart your computer"-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and "allow" them to actually talk to the people having the problems. This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.
I think the unfortunate truth is that "please restart your computer"-level stuff actually does solve whatever problem the customer is reporting enough that companies put value into that type of support. If you're reading HN you probably don't need that level of support, but that's not to say there aren't customers who need their hand held to restart a computer.
Part of the issue is that support is never allowed to push back on the customer. They don't get to say "I'm sorry, but you'll have to do a rudimentary computing course before I can proceed further". In a business environment it's all to easy to save on training costs in a department because they can push those costs on to support.
Drive is more or less a worthless toy in my opinion (along with Microsoft's thing that competes with it.) There isn't even a Linux client. Go download synchthing and be done with it.
1. About 4 years ago, I tried to move a business on Google Maps. It took 10 months and contacting AdWords support to get it done.
2. This year I've been trying to get an API quota increase for my employer. At 3+ months the request has still gone unanswered. Thankfully we don't depend on that for any revenue-generating function.