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Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

calculatedriskblog.com

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Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#41

Post by prawn »

gohrt wrote: post #16
pgrote wrote: post #9

Even if you use the recommended support channels such as Groups, your request goes nowhere. I've run into this reporting issues for Google Now and Picasa Web. Moderators continually move or delete reports of issues. When you explain the situation and why X is more appropriate than Y you get radio silence. Has anyone actually gotten real support from Google for paid applications? Is it limited to the Groups?

Picasa Web was put out to pasture a long time ago, in favor of G+ Photos.

Picasa is now overrun with Chinese spammers using the "send to a friend"-type feature. I mark every incoming Picasa share message as spam and Gmail still lets them all through...

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#42

Post by cabbeer »

guiomie wrote: post #40
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

I thought google had support ... that's what the movie "The intership" lead me to believe.

I don't think that movie was intended to be factual.... or funny.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#44

Post by dredmorbius »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

I am ... less than pleased with Google as a company and its policies of late (I came home a couple of weekends back to find the top 3 HN slots addressing issues with Google and the YT/Google+ integration, two of which were either links to or based on my posts there).

That said: I've found Google personnel highly responsive (though not always immediately so) to issues I've raised. Most recently with the Data Liberation Front's lead emailing me directly (after finding he couldn't reply to my G+ posts because I'd disabled interactions there) while on sabbatical to find out what's up.

Not to say that Google don't have their warts and have been highly insensitive to human-factors issues of late. But even some pretty testy and frustrated folk have found that there are contacts from deep within the machine.

Though JOOTSing -- jumping out of the (nominal support/ticket) system -- does seem to be rather too frequently required.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#45

Post by toomuchtodo »

GuiA wrote: post #29
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

I've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...

As a long time Gmail user heavily invested in it (with over 60GB of email), I'm waiting patiently for mailpile.is to get rolled out.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#46

Post by toomuchtodo »

masterleep wrote: post #37
nl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perfect example of what a complete screw up the whole multiple Google Account thing is. I can't suggest a better solution, but wow - it sucks at the moment. Edit: Would it be possible to find out from the friend at Google if they are doing anything to report this anomaly to users? The author can't be the only person this happened to, and given that Google knows this, perhaps it would be useful if the error message…

It's a bag of hurt.

That's an excellent tag line to describe Google Support.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

cabbeer wrote: post #43

Just curious, how is Microsoft's support in this department? Has anyone dealt with customer support for hotmail/outlook, skydrive, etc ?

Some years back I determined that Microsoft had a massive problem with spam transiting their network. I found a Sr. VP's name associated with the service, phoned the main switchboard, and asked for him.

He picked up his phone on the first ring.

I briefly described the issue (and how I'd determined it was a problem), he told me he'd have the appropriate manager get in touch with me later that day. I received that call 15 minutes later, and worked with the manager (submitting specific emails and identifying where on their network the problems were manifesting) for a couple of months during which time the spam volumes fell well over 90%.

Part of the trick is knowing how to navigate / manipulate the system, and finding a problem they acknowledge as theirs. But in that particular case (and a small handful of others) I found the company highly responsive.

Now, several years later when I'd bought both a shrinkwrap product and support contract to specifically resolve a data issue with a product of theirs, I got sandbagged. Demanded my money back for the contract.

And no, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But they do (at times at least) know how to run a business.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#48

Post by tempestn »

cabbeer wrote: post #43

Just curious, how is Microsoft's support in this department? Has anyone dealt with customer support for hotmail/outlook, skydrive, etc ?

I briefly used Microsoft's Azure Bing custom search engine, or whatever they call it. I found the support to be extremely responsive and reasonably knowledgeable, even though I was only spending a few hundred a month. That said, the actual product features and terms of use were both significantly behind both Yahoo BOSS (which uses the same Bing index) and Google's search API. (One particularly terrible term was that you can't use it on pages with any advertising besides Yahoo/Bing ads.)

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#50

Post by Osiris »

I work at GoDaddy and recently our CEO read an email from a customer who had been encouraged by a son to use Google services for his small business, but when he couldn't figure out some issue with support ("they talked way over my head"), he called GoDaddy and found someone that worked to get his account setup.

Google probably, appropriately, calculates the cost of providing good customer support to hundreds of millions of people as way too high. But by doing so, they do leave open the door to smaller companies to compete, not on the product, but on the service and support.

Google could, at the very least, make sure that it provides sufficient support for all billing related issues. If a customer is paying for a product and there's a problem with their billing, they should be able to get a person on the phone or web chat to resolve it if the online tools are insufficient.

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