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Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

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Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#71

Post by klardotsh »

josteink wrote: post #53
godzillabrennus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is already established as a god awful vendor partner. It’s reflected in their cloud divisions performance. Anyone sane is using someone else if they can.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

Welp, today you get to meet one, hi, I'm klardotsh!

Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#72

Post by Someone1234 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
josteink wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

>I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. Snapchat uses Google Cloud. So does Pokemon Go.

They have a dozen or more "hero companies" that they advertise.

The big question is are those organic customers or attracted onto the platform for big discounts in order to be adverts?

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#73

Post by jjav »

throwaway28883 wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, this is the way things go. If you are going to build a business on top of something offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc, you will never rest easy because you should know your app can be killed at any time for any reason, right or wrong. These companies are omnipotent and untouchable. They have these automated systems in place because they have determined them to be the most cost effective w…

Very important lesson that we as an industry need to learn better.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#74

Post by wdewind »

rootusrootus wrote: post #22
mindslight wrote: post #4

I've got to wonder if, after basic Twit-shaming becomes no longer scalable, Google support will basically end up taking the same essential shape as IRS support - if you receive a nastygram, you turn it over to your professional account/attorney/googvocate who's entire specialty is knowing how to "talk to" the organization.

That is not a great comparison. IRS phone support is actually pretty good. I would be ecstatic if Google could get even halfway there.

My experience is the IRS telling me I owe them $20,000, me calling them three separate times and having estimated wait times of over 3+ hours each time, finally just giving up turning it over to my accountant, who charged me $400 to find out that in fact the IRS owed me $3,000. So I dunno, to me I think it's a pretty good comparison, but obviously from the other replies mileage varies.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#75

Post by TomMckenny »

noonespecial wrote: post #16

They seem to think they have plenty of developers to burn through like this as if they were some sort of consumable. But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic. They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric…

Similar attitude toward employees and even customers is spread across companies: there are always a near infinite number remaining.

It could be a perverse inverse manifestation of the 20/80 rule on an algorithmic or institutional scale: so long as we're only losing x% it doesn't matter because some in the excluded group might have been more effort to deal with.

>become an existential threat to the play store.

This will require a viable alternative and a wide spread reputation that they are a regular business killer.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#76

Post by sokoloff »

jtchang wrote: post #62
josteink wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

Yeah Amazon (especially AWS) is pretty decent with customer service all things considering. I've heard of people getting hacked and having huge bills because they stared up bitcoin miners with their account. I think AWS actually refunded the charges. Scary to think if Google would do the same as easily.

The "hacking" is often reading access keys out of public repositories, so not exactly nation-state stuff here.

I can confirm that we had that happen to a developer account (who did exactly that ) and AWS refunded the charges with zero hassles.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#77

Post by gcbw2 »

klardotsh wrote: post #71
josteink wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

Welp, today you get to meet one, hi, I'm klardotsh! Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.

> zero of the setup is intuitive

that is true on the other side too.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#78

Post by gcbw2 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
josteink wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

>I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. Snapchat uses Google Cloud. So does Pokemon Go.

> Pokemon Go

The poster child of unplanned outages and scalability issues. Ouch.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#79

Post by mindslight »

mehrdadn wrote: post #58
mindslight wrote: post #4

I've got to wonder if, after basic Twit-shaming becomes no longer scalable, Google support will basically end up taking the same essential shape as IRS support - if you receive a nastygram, you turn it over to your professional account/attorney/googvocate who's entire specialty is knowing how to "talk to" the organization.

I hope you've had a bad experience with the IRS because otherwise it's really frustrating to see the government-targeted analog of libel. Imagine working hard and professionally to serve your country only to have your reputation tarnished like this.

That was not a political comment - merely remarking on the practicalities of dealing with large powerful organizations.

While some aspects of interacting with the IRS may be refreshingly easy compared to expectations, they are not setup to be universally so. See the steep after-the-fact penalties for getting some types of things wrong (as opposed to simply just preventing them in the first place), as well as the prohibitive fees associated with "private letter rulings".

Your appeal to the individual people working there is fallacious, as it would preclude any criticism of organizations as a whole. I have no doubt that the individuals working there are all trying to do a decent job, just as at Google. The problems are at higher levels of complexity. A program segfaulting is not an indictment of the transistors.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#80

Post by sodosopa »

josteink wrote: post #53
godzillabrennus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is already established as a god awful vendor partner. It’s reflected in their cloud divisions performance. Anyone sane is using someone else if they can.

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

Hi there are dozens of us using Google Cloud. We’re using it for a variety of NLP work alongside on prem systems. Fun stuff.
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