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That doesn't sound factual at all. Got docs which support that? They send us emails every time they plan on doing intentional maintenance on our instances.
I wish it wasn't true. On all the occasions, I was told that there was "an issue with the underlying hardware".
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FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P
https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886...
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I wish it wasn't true. On all the occasions, I was told that there was "an issue with the underlying hardware".
It is worth noting that "the cloud" is synonymous with "someone else's computer"
Well, no, its not, otherwise "private cloud" would be incoherent.
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FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
> When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. Maybe they expect you to cancel the card upon deleting an account. It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. Not many look at their credit card statement anyways.
It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned.
Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen.
PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes.
Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal.
It's a story that'll be repeated over and over.
My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance
Love the "Reduce Customer Anxiety" phrase. Reminds me of the emergency telephone signs on the Golden Gate Bridge. They once read "Emergency Telephone in case of Breakdown", so people could call a tow truck. Then they were changed to "Emergency Telephone for Psychological Counseling" and now connect to suicide prevention. I can see someone with a flat tire on the phone, "And how does having a flat tire make you feel?"…
But it's just marketing, at the end of the day support is still a large expense that some companies believe they don't have to bear. This seems to work for some companies better than others, likely due to different business models leading to different customer expectations and requirements.
My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance
I really want to believe you, but every Google service has been like this for years. Like Play Store for example. It will take way more to show you guys really are reviewing similar incidents and, more importantly, to actually act on your reviews and improve your processes.
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Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? I've had similar problems in the past with Amazon shutting down services and providing little to no support to get it remediated. Even after paying for technical support, it was impossible to recover (in our case, it was a billing issue that was entirely Amazon's fault). My general recommendations are: - be sure you have fully scripted your deployment process, - be s…
> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimiz…
Now it's obvious that companies just want to save money, but another reality is that those human processes just cannot compete on the service they offer to their customers, developers. You could have the best QA team in the world, but compared to a dev team armed with mature testing practices and CI, it's seconds vs. hours for developers to get the feedback they need in order to ship.
Infrastructure hardware is cheaper than ever these days in order to compete with the Cloud, while good developers are at an all time premium. When infrastructure is no longer a slow, scarce resource, it enables developers to spend more time perfecting their applications and experimenting with new approaches. So I suggest you not approach the Cloud as purely a cost saving measure for the infrastructure department, and really think about how transformative it can be in changing your IT processes.
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Write a good blog post and get it to the front page of a news aggregator
We became aware of Fred's problem before we knew it was here. -Terrance
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I really want to believe you, but every Google service has been like this for years. Like Play Store for example. It will take way more to show you guys really are reviewing similar incidents and, more importantly, to actually act on your reviews and improve your processes.
This is absolute BS. I've had nothing but stellar support from the Play store and you can easily contact them via chat, email or even voice.
I wrote a little app to help myself learn birdsong. You copy some mp3s to a folder on your sdcard, open the folder in the app, and it will shuffle them and only show you the name of the file if you ask. Pretty simple, but I found it useful and thought it might be useful to other people. So I pay my $25, upload my app, and wake up the next day to an email saying my app had been suspended for "deceitful behaviour" and that it happened again they might suspend my other Google services, for instance the gmail account I've had since 2004.
Of course the email doesn't contain any information on what the deceitful behavior was, so like a Kafka story, I'm stuck defending myself against charges that I'm never informed of. When I heard back from support, they say that my app opens to a list of mp3 apps to download. So either my account has been hacked and someone changed the app apk, or they are unable to tell the difference between a directory listing from the sdcard and a list of mp3 apps. If the latter, how my app can be deceitful when it matches one of the screenshots I attached is completely beyond me.
Once my email migration to fastmail is complete, I'll rename my app and try again, this time with a modified UI that makes you click a button before showing a directory listing. I'd like to get my $25 worth if nothing else.
This whole incident has left me with zero confidence in their customer service or technical competence.
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> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimiz…
IMHO, I think this misses the larger motivator for moving to these services. I don't think you can approach the Cloud as just "a less expensive data center", because you're missing what I believe is the real motivator, "developer productivity". And I don't think this is just Cloud, it's DevOps, Microservices, CI/CD, Serverless, etc. I consult in these areas at large enterprises and have a front row seat to how a lot…