Leaving Google Fi

My wife and I left fi for exactly the same reason as the blog post. My wife had a problem with her pixel 2, and she was pretty much without a phone for WEEKS. We absolutely adored fi for years before that. We were huge advocates. After we had such a horrible experience being gaslighted, promised, and let down we just fuck this and went to AT&T. It’s not like we love AT&T. In fact, we don’t. But you know what we can do? We can walk our asses in a store in pretty much any city in the country and leave with a phone.

I live in the U.S. and frequently travel internationally. In this capacity, Fi is the best service I've used by far. When I'm in the U.S., my monthly bill is quite inexpensive, too, rarely exceeding $27 (including taxes). No B.S. hotspot fee (or having to jump through hoops to circumvent one). And I use an additional SIM card Google provided free-of-charge with an LTE modem to reverse-tunnel to a low-bandwidth automation server in a remote location. All great stuff.

Unfortunately, my experience with Fi customer service has been no better than Atwood's. Basically, if you can't solve a problem on your own, you're out of luck. To be fair, I've had terrible service with other providers, too (I haven't tried Apple but for technical reasons the iPhone would not work for me).

Guys an idiot. If the current generation weren't so afraid of _actually speaking with someone_ instead of hiding behind emails and live chats, this would have been resolved on day one.

Two stories spring to mind.

The first is I worked at Google when the whole "real names" saga of Google Plus was going on. The worst part about that was if some algorithm decided your name wasn't real, it could block your entire Google account. You'd lose access to GMail, Drive, everything. I don't know what bright spark PMs, lawyers and executives signed off on that one but it was insanity. As a result I would strongly recommend against any family or friends use any G+ features in case the Real Names bot zapped their accounts. This was ultimately fixed but it should never have shipped that way. Ever.

The fact that disputing a charge with you credit card provider like this could result in you losing your GMail, Drive, Android developer account, etc means you should absolutely under no circumstances use that service, ever, period, no exceptions.

Don't get me wrong: I like GMail and Drive. I use them all the time. Thing is, I want to keep using them so they get firewalled from every other service that I use.

The second is something Eric Schmidt said a lot. He didn't say it first but he's well known for saying it, and that is that more revenue is the solution to every problem.

That's both true and not true. It's true in a high margin business (like search). If you look at Google financials 10+ years ago there was a point where the profit per employee was nearly $1m. It's less now but it's still pretty significant. Low margin businesses are not in its DNA.

Let me repeat that and make it clear: Google simply cannot compete in a low margin business.

Personally I learned this the hard way as I worked on Google Fiber until that was quietly shelved (by "advancing our amazing bet" no less). Fiber services are capital intensive. They require strict financial discipline and planning. There are far more moving parts to this kind of business than many people realize. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have gotten very good at this sort of business. Google didn't (and IMHO never will).

I put Google Fi firmly in this camp. I also put making hardware at scale in this camp (compared to, say, Apple who is second to none when it comes to logistics, procurement, financing and supply chain management).

Google's DNA is hard technical problems at scale with no UI like an almost blank page with a text box and a search button. The infrastructure behind that is unbelievably good.

But telecommunications? Tied to my Google account? Sorry but that's a hard pass for me.

I had similar issues too. Awful customer service, more than a month shipping delay for the Pixel 3, "Google Fi VPN" does not work in China, only the mobile data, is better to buy a SIM over there, Wifi calling didn't work either. Now here in the US, the signal is pretty bad too, sometimes while talking to someone the call just goes silent and the other person can't hear you. My pixel 3 makes a weird noise ( like an insect trapped inside your phone) from time to time. and more... I switched to Verizon a month ago.