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It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

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Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#191

Post by gcb0 »

victorhooi wrote: post #156
gcb0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they cared they could fix the bug too. Google is now a huge, slow corporation. you don't get promoted by working on old and boring projects. everyone fight to get into the new sexy rewrite of something that is already somewhat successful. yeah they can screw up and kill features, but users will continue to use ensuring your promotions. in a huge corp, do not assume that just because the little support guy understa…

We do care, and it's certainly something we have been actively working on. However, the fact that other desktop sync clients from other providers exhibit similar performance characteristics possibly indicate that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume.

I never used drive, despite my employer subscribing to the whole Google drive thing just for hangouts (which only recently allows more than 11ppl)

but a friend maintains a studio and they use your biggest competitor. they sync over a million instrument sampler files per composer. granted that the initial upload and new drive takes almost a week working exclusively on the first sync, but after that it works.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#192

Post by wastedhours »

shermozle wrote: post #100
flukus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more expensive. That said, I do think software devs should be more involved with the customer for other reasons, far to often they are building software without having any idea what the customers workflow is.

The same reason forcing devs to do ops on their own product justifies having devs do (some of) their own customer support. Otherwise they just toss any old crap over the fence and it becomes somebody elses' problem. Force them to solve those problems and they magically go away, cos devs hate support.

If possible, teams should always "fix it twice" from support requests - get the customer sorted ASAP, and then determine if it's possible to solve the problem fully (either extra support documentation, patch, longer term feature etc...).

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#194

Post by unityByFreedom »

rbritton wrote: post #120

I won't use any Google product for anything serious because of the complete and utter lack of support. It is virtually impossible to get a human to look at something, even when the process outlined is human-based rather than automated. 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 incr…

Looked like there was a lot of support given in this case. Just no solution yet. I wouldn't infer lack of support from this, particularly since the user can still access Drive from the browser.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#195

Post by unityByFreedom »

kelvin0 wrote: post #77

Google has the WORSE support I've ever experienced as a (former) PAYING corporate customer of theirs. I completely distrust ANYTHING they tell me and would NEVER again be caught paying for anything coming from them. Never again.

Do you have details on your experience?

Support actually looks decent per this post. Just no solution yet. But that's different, since the product still works for this user via the web.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#196

Post by dredmorbius »

mgkimsal wrote: post #45
Steeeve wrote: post #42

That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google. I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is seco…

"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.

It's the Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#197

Post by dx034 »

victorhooi wrote: post #162
inferiorhuman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume. Because Google doesn't have the resources to tackle challenging problems? lol. A difficult to solve problem on its own is one thing, but the comically awful support Google offers indicates that it's more likely a "we don't care" versus a "we don't know how" problem.

We don't have a monopoly on clever CS people =). I'm pretty sure Dropbox and Box.net have lots of smart people working for them as well. (In fact, I have friends at Dropbox) I'm not an expert in that specific bug, so I won't speculate publicly - but the memory issue is something that has seen steady commits over time from various people who are plugging away diligently at it. It's a bit of a moving target, and there…

> I'm pretty sure Dropbox and Box.net have lots of smart people working for them as well. (In fact, I have friends at Dropbox)

While I cannot say anything regarding Box.net, the Dropbox app on Windows is one of the best working programmes I have installed. It has never crashed and doesn't slow down my computer, no matter how much it has to sync. I never understood why Google isn't able to copy Dropbox behaviour even after years. GDrive is still able to slow down my computer notably if I sync a lot of files and it tends to lose the connection every week or so until I restart it.

If you then look at how reliably Google Search or Gmail work, the answer can just be that Google doesn't care, not that they couldn't do it.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#198

Post by laurent123456 »

dpkonofa wrote: post #69
victorhooi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on that team =). I won't say much publicly, but if this is the issue I think it is (customer has a huge number of files, and is trying to sync it with a 32-bit client, and hitting memory issues), we are aware of the issue, and are definitely working on it. It's a tricky thing to solve in any sync client - for example, Dropbox has a cap around 300,000 files (I believe this customer had 700,000 files?): > https://…

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…

They might be an edge case but in that case the problem is that the client crashes without any explanation. If it had displayed an error like "Sorry, the Google Drive client does not currently more than 700,000 files - you may use the web client instead" and exit, that would have saved a lot troubles to this user.

Also why can't the support tell him that directly, instead of the endless vague explanations.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#199

Post by wyclif »

zamber wrote: post #187
wyclif wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I thought the second I read this: We would be needing further informations It sounds uncannily as if Google has offshored service on Google Drive.

I'm pretty sure they did. Along with some other services. In Wrocław (Poland) we have a Google office. From water cooler talk I heard that it's mostly support. From another source I heard about support calls where one side eventually figured out the accent and suggested moving from English to Polish ;). Plural for information is valid in Polish and probably other Slavic languages (s. "informacja", p. "informacje"). A…

Misplaced English plurals are also common in SE Asia.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#200

Post by dx034 »

markdown wrote: post #82
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

Upvoting so someone at Google can look at this. I won't use a Google product if I can avoid it because their support is terrible and automated. At their scale I imagine any customer slight can be rounded off because of the sheer number of customers they have.

I love love love Google support, in particular with Google Suite. Would be awesome if their free products came with support, but I know that's asking too much.

Why is it? You pay via ads and their margin on these products is probably quite healthy. Why shouldn't they offer support?
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