I bought $50 worth of ads using my credit card. My account was immediately suspended for suspicious payment. I appealed, noting the card was mine, and I bought the ads. The appeal was rejected.

I have occasionally tried to resubmit the appeal, but it says "please wait 3-5 business days before submitting a new appeal." I wait more than that and get the same message.

I've called Google to try to talk to them. However, once it asks for my contact information, it tells me that they cannot talk to me because my account is suspended. It's a circular nightmare.

I currently do not needs ads so it's not a hardship. But it is extremely frustrating.

EDIT: One irony is that it is the same card I use to pay for my other Google services, linked through the same payment backend. They have no issue charging that card for my other services. But for Ads, it's suspicious. Who knows.

<insert Lilly Tomlin Phone Company Skit Here>

I attended the third Google Summer of Code, and they paid me using an unnamed credit card. It was impossible to use the card anywhere, including using their very own Google Checkout!

All my transaction attempts were flagged as suspicious by Google. And I was performing very normal purchases from a regular country, both online and onsite.

Getting hold of someone that could help me was a nightmare, and I only managed to use my funds 20 hours before the card expired, and a year after GSoC had ended.

They have never had a customer service.

Details - https://ilya-sher.org/2018/03/23/google-deleted-our-g-suite/

The demand for this coin is basically unlimited.

The next phase is when someone who believes in the startup gets to a exec position within google, and can hire and shield actual CSRs who only work through the startup. That business unit will find more success because of the better customer support, which will put pressure on other business units to do the same.

It would of course be much better if google just had the decency to provide human support.

Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"

I have Google One and it annoys me that the new Drive client automatically adds a shortcut to my favorites in Finder and Explorer everytime I restart my computer. Google has been made aware of this a year ago according to threads in their product forums from about a year ago (they have thousands of upvotes). They haven't done anything about it and I haven't heard any feedback from the request that the support rep forwarded to the product team.

So from my POV it looks like they have support staff that answers to your request, but they have basically no power in the company and can't make any decisions. They probably send their request into a void where they get ignored.

My guess is that the only way to work with Google as a business is to buy their services over a major partner that generates tens of millions in revenue per year and has a personal relationship with account managers at Google.

Just a reminder, most businesses fail - so doing what many people do is not necessarily the best thing to do.

Having said that, it's rather foolish to have your business depend on Google. They have repeatedly demonstrated they're not good business partners and the main thrust of their business isn't in providing products and services for businesses. They don't support their services, they'll drop them at a moment's notice without any regard to the impacts to your business, and there's no way to get ahold of a human being when things inevitably go sour. Why do you want to partner with someone like that?

I bash on the technical merits of Windows all day long but one thing Microsoft has done well over its nearly 50 year history is serving the needs of business. It's in their DNA. Office 365 is a very capable, and supported, platform. Nice thing is you can run it on a Mac too!

Google products are much better from a UX perspective imho.

In my business I like the option of sharing a .docx or .pptx and not having to ask a client to use google docs to view stuff. But when I had google docs, I made it work. I agree with the root comment that MS is much more business oriented though. At the end of the day, Google's "products" are still just a ruse to sell ads, so they don't have the institutional focus on solving business problems that MS has (not that MS is in any way perfect)

I used to work as a sysadmin for a Windows shop. The support was terrible (~2013). Can't say about Google though.

Not because of the product, which seems fine. But because 10 years ago I signed up for google apps. It was marketed as a way to have a vanity gmail domain. Free forever up to 10 users.

I thought it was cool, was a huge Google fan at the time, and created a custom domain for myself and another one for my grandparents. Now, 10 years later they are holding my online persona hostage in a shameless cash grab to try and make Workspaces more profitable.

All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain. I have zero use for the business functionality. Fuck you google.

I'm a VP of Cloud Platform for a rather large enterprise and quite frankly this is why we won't even consider Google Cloud. Broken trust. Broken promises.

I'm in the same boat, but since ~2006 when I started my first company (dont recall exactly when I set up my google apps account though). I have to chose whether to move my account (which thanks to sign in with google is attached to more places than I can even remember), or pony up $6/mo/user with 20 friends and family having email accounts under my domain.

I have not yet decided what to do. But if I leave Google. I will leave for life, and that includes multiple other Workplace accounts that I already DO pay for. I'm sure losing a few thousand a year doesn't matter to them, but mail-in-a-box seems like a decent fit for my limited email I actually use on those older accounts.

Its now about the principle rather than how much it actually costs.

/shameless_plug

You're right about Moogle. While I was working on building PretzelBox, I had launched just the blogging piece - i.e. post to your blog from Gmal - as a standalone service on Moogle.cc.

Appreciate you taking the time to give feedback.

I used to think refusing that option and creating new accounts was just me being obtuse, but I don't regret it now (and with a password manager it's mostly not a major drag).

You don't need Workspace to use the Gmail UI with your custom domain. All you need is a regular free @gmail.com account. First switch your domain to an email hosting service that provides SMTP and IMAP, you probably get one free from your domain registrar. In Gmail settings for your @gmail account, add your custom domain as an alternate address for sending mail, using your SMTP server. Also configure Gmail to fetch mail from your IMAP server. Voila! Gmail is now a frontend for your custom domain, absolutely free. You can continue to use your existing custom email addresses, and you can forget about Workspace forever.

If you have purchased content such as Play Store apps that are tied to your Workspace account, you can downgrade it to a "Cloud Identity Free Edition" account, and continue to use it. This is a pain, and I think they are finally working on some kind of migration tool to move that content to another account. Hopefully that happens soon.

- gmail - drive storage - calendar - contacts - keep - photos - music - domains - Pay - adsense - webmaster tools - analytics - authenticator - Home - maps - chrome - youtube - Play - email at external sites

Can you explain your idea about using Cloud Identity Free Edition in order to allow an email at a third party to own Play Store apps?

- The braced hamburger menu — your logo, actually, on your blog home page redirects to bulma.io.

- There’s no way to switch from the "Very Cool" template back to the original.

Who owns the domain here? I use a custom domain with Gmail Workspaces, but I own the domain, and therefore control the MX records. The only thing I'd lose in a switch is stored email messages, but there are ways to download those.

It will be a huge pain in the ass trying to do it for my grandparents though.

And at this point, the pattern is clear. Google Business products are free until they are not. Building them into your infrastructure is taking on technical debt that you will have to pay down in the future, either by actually buying the product when they decide it is no longer free or by switching to an alternative.

I still run into websites with a big API disabled rectangle where their Google maps integration used to be.

Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later.

The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac.

I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, the marketing plan for a major public company often mentioned on HN, and other documents clearly accidentally stored/shared with this group.

Except the google desktop client is utterly flaky. They make Dropbox look good.

Not sure what your dropbox issue is but I'd check you have the latest client, check you have granted file folder permissions to the app if using macos. First sync takes a while but performance is good after the first sync.

I've also used One Drive, GDrive, IDrive, Mega and some others. All of them have different issues. I guess I hate One Drive the least, but the barrier is low.

The problem with the Business side of Drive is how Google conflates Groups, the message board/mailing list product with Groups that you apply permissions to. The chapter I belonged to had our own Google Apps domain. My account on that domain was added to one of the mothership's Groups so I would get announcements and participate in discussions.

Unknown to them, that Group inherited a lot of default permissions from their Shared Drives. I couldn't get to the drives by browsing, but if I searched for terms that matched documents in those shared drives, I could open the documents AND open the containing folder. At which point I could browse up to the root of the shared drive.

I reported it on the sly, one Mistress of Webs to another. We had a good "holy sh** what?!" laugh about it.

It got fixed but as I've spoken to people at other NPO orgs that use Google apps, I've found that most have had the same mess happen: A group with external members was created as a convenient mailing list. Then, later they discovered that if the external member was also a Google for Business account they "inherited" some interesting access to things in Drive.

One of the things I love about HN is the humor.

Knowing Google the plan is to kill it and make a new thing, without options of moving, make it free so people flock to it and then turn into a subscription a year later.

But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.

But, yes, what I'd really like to do in many cases is to basically create a symlink to documents I know I'll be referencing/working with somewhere that they aren't mixed in with all the shared meeting presentations and the like I'll never look at again.

And yes, according to their forums, even this feature will be removed at some point in the medium term future.

If people just forgot where they put something, it seems like you need to develop and practice some organization. I work with lots of clients and use Drive and organize things into folders named for each client, and then into separate categories based on what the file is. It's relatively easy to find things.

If I happen to forget, then I've found the search works well. I use the cloudsearch page at cloudsearch.google.com

Mostly, organization of files behaves... oddly. It is weirdly hard to ensure everyone has a consistent view of a hierarchy / folders. Search does work, so long as you have a good idea what you are searching for. It isn't great for discoverability, or if you only have a vague idea what it is you are looking for.

(sorry if your message was accompanied by an "/s" -- I didn't see any)

Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.

Perhaps they get some usage data of how/when people work?

I do believe much of what Google does (i.e. chrome) is to benefit their ads business, but I think it's a bit cynical to think that's true of every product they have.

FWIW I've worked at companies that use both Microsoft + Google suites (mostly drive + calendar + mail) and generally preferred Google's. I did not have any issues like the post mentions.

It literally says in gdrive tos that they read the docs, yes they do .

"Our automated systems analyse your content to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, and spam and malware detection,"

That being said, I've read through all the Google Terms of Service online, and I can't actually figure out whether they still use Google Drive content for customized search results.

I'm starting a restaurant. I put together a doc about items I need. All the sudden I'm getting ads for restaurant equipment.

Google's definition of "reading" involves human eyeballs.

Do they have algorithms in place that can collect personal data from drive documents?

Most likely.

It's been proven that they scan your mail for every scrap of available info such as web links and purchases receipts. Why would they treat other documents any differently when there is no legal requirement to do so?

https://mashable.com/article/gmail-tracks-your-purchases

https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/gmail-snooping/

Can you prove or show anything in their terms of service or privacy policy that legally prevents it?

Being a profit driven company, the only reasonable assumption is that anything that can be used to increase profits will be used.

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

> We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.

https://workspace.google.com/security/

> Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes and we do not display ads in Google Workspace

https://workspace.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html

> Notwithstanding any other term of the Agreement, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services.

Will you be retracting your claims, or are you planning on moving the goal posts instead?

LOL! Everything from Google must be carefully and legally parsed.

No, they don't show ads *from Drive, GMail or Photos* --- these services are ad free. They do show ads *from the web* --- based on your personal profile and data collected from multiple sources. Nothing here rules out using data from Drive, Gmail and Photos to profile you.

It's been proven that they scan, collect and save purchase receipts and access/scan web links contained in Gmail documents. Why do you suppose they do this?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629789/google-purchase-...

Regarding your *Workspace Premier* terms --- The document you quote is not current but paid services do have different TOS. This is not a major source of their income.

Are you really seriously claiming that there's some kind of ambiguity in "Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes"?

If you're going to argue that "advertising purposes" wouldn't cover using the data for ad targeting, they have text explicitly addressing that too:

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_fj/drive/

Your [Drive] content is safe, private, and never used for ad personalization

> The document you quote is not current but paid services do have different TOS

True, sorry about that! The current version states:

Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services.

But given that it's the same text, I don't really see how this helps your case.

> This is not a major source of their income.

Why would that matter?

> It's been proven that they scan, collect and save purchase receipts and access/scan web links contained in Gmail documents. Why do you suppose they do this?

Pretty obviously the receipt thing was due to it being a really convenient feature for Gmail users. I used it multiple times, and was sad when it was removed due to the outcry. For scanning web links, the even more obvious reason is to scan the links for malware, phishing pages, etc. But I am confident that these things are not for any kind of advertising purposes. And so should you: it was after all you who set the bar at whether using the data for ads was disallowed by the privacy policy or TOS.

When you get to set the standard of proof, and then refuse to accept that proof when provided, it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

When your proof is "I trust Google", it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

It costs Google time and money to scan your email and extract and store your purchase receipts --- and you think their only motivation was to be nice? Wow!

But assuming your interpretation agrees with Google's legal team ... where do you suppose they get all the info needed to profile users and deliver "personalized" ads --- which is how they make 90% of their money?

But not from the productivity apps, which is what you were complaining about.

> When your proof is "I trust Google", it doesn't really feel like you're acting in good faith here.

What do you think the reactions from various regulators around the world would be if these statements turned out to be blatant lies like you suggest? Lying about it would be really, really stupid when the option is to say nothing.

If you don't trust the TOS and the privacy policy on such crystal clear statements, why did you suggest that as the proof you wanted to see?

And presumably Google Docs and Google Sheets --- which are productivity apps. Basically any of their "free" services.

What do you think the reactions from various regulators around the world would be if these statements turned out to be blatant lies like you suggest?

They're not blatant lies. I showed you above, Google is perfectly OK with you interpreting things in a way that differs from the legally plausible argument they will put forth in a legal setting.

Your TOS quotes are from their paid "premier" products. These are not their only productivity apps.

No. I did not include them in that list for two reasons. First, as has been demonstrated Google is incredibly explicit about data on Drive (which Docs and Sheets are) not being used for ad targeting. There is no ambiguity there. Second, because those apps are not listed on that activity page. Nor are the other apps where Google is making explicit statements about the data not being used for advertising purposes, e.g. Gmail, Photos, Chat.

Again, they're pretty open about the apps whose data can be used for ad targeting. There is no misdirection there, there is no hiding of them from the list of data that they have. If you were correct and they were just blatantly lying, why not do it for all products?

> Your TOS quotes are from their paid "premier" products. These are not their only productivity apps.

The initial submission was about Workspace, so of course I linked to those. But when you moved the goalposts, I posted additional links that were about consumer services (Gmail, Drive). But here's one more. The page for with the account privacy settings says the following, whether you have ads personalization turned on or off, and even for a consumer account:

https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/data-and-privacy

Content from Drive, Gmail and Photos is never used for any ads purposes.

There is just no ambiguity here.

Oh and don't think for a second, that using MS' alternative web products (Office 365) is much better. You pay for the probably buggiest office experience on the planet.

Microsoft deals with businesses, and it works.

I can understand why you "had" to rely on Google Ads. But in my opinion choosing Google Workspace/Drive falls unfortunately under "problem of your own making". None of the problems you describe is new nor unknown, and there are plenty of products that are just as good.

> I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

I think that that's the issue: maybe not in ads, but there is competition for everything else.

Other than MS Office, what's a good suite providing all of shared docs, spreadsheets, email, and a cloud drive?

I don't really see the advantage this would give me over any desktop solution at all, while giving me a ton of disadvantages. Any update could destroy my companies work, and there would be nothing I could do. I can't guarantee data privacy for both myself (trade secrets?) and my customers (data protection laws?). I can't really build automated infrastructure on top of google because they could change any part of the product ever so slightly without notice and have it break things with a big crash (or maybe even worse: silently).

Infrastructure that you are in control of is better than infrastructure that you are not in control of, if the core of your business depends on it.

Upon appeal, they emailed me back saying "we can confirm your account isn't suspended"... It's like what are you talking about? I'm looking right at a big red banner saying my account is suspended!

My hopes are not high for a fast resolution.

The opinions of many is that Google is very unreliable, unless you are a big enough customer for them to care. It gets really weird when you start paying for various Google services, but apparently are not paying enough. There can be an expectation of customer service and support, that is not there.

Even worse, if you are not big enough to matter or paying them enough, seems you can easily get stepped on (to include odd suspensions). Your business revenues can possibly decrease, where you thought previously it would been a good idea to use Google services and products.

Very good argument, as a small business, not to rely on Google. Find other ways, with better customer support and less weirdness. Have low expectations of Google, like you would street gangsters in the hood squeezing local unsuspecting businesses for cash.

I think we will see more competitors in this space though. Google isn’t investing enough into it and there is opportunity.

I've heard the same advice here on HN: if you're using Google tools for anything, do not use Adsense.

Most of their money comes from Ads, they couldn't give two crap about all other services, including cloud. And that's why they keep launching and discontinuing products.

I really like sheets because I learned how to use AppScript to automate a lot and I can't imagine working on anything without that functionality. Same goes for docs, slides and the rest of the suite.

We do have a guy who handles all the support and set-up though so I don't have the full perspective on this.

1) Try increasing number of nodes - > fails with some cryptic message saying number of in use addresses is hitting the quota limit.

2) Search through their absolutely garbage console to go to the exact page which has the quotas. Try editing - > See a tooltip (not even an error message just a tooltip) saying I can't do it my self and has to contact their support.

3) Contact their billing support and ask for quota increase. After taking all the details they redirect me to their sales support.

4) Contact their sales support and its like dealing with second hand car sales people. Even after clearly stating that I'm an existing customer, they want a complete biography of my whole business, its needs and everything else. At the end they say they don't have anyway to actually raise the quote increase request from their side.

5) They have helpfully assigned me a relationship manager for further 'assisting' me with evaluating their products and that I got a meeting request for next week to discuss our 'needs'.

Absolute garbage company with third rate support and sales people. And I can say that with confidence because I had the exact opposite experience with Linode when trying to raise limits on my account. Got a human to both respond and increase the limit almost immediately and I didn't need to provide any details about my business.

I'm with OP - Google products are absolute trash.

2. Link to your company website

3. Better marketing than your allegedly suspended AdWords account!

No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30771057

I also distrust "free". If I'm not signing a contract, I have to assume I don't have any real recourse if something random like this happens.

It works, don't get me wrong. But I'm helping a family member start a business on the tech front, and most of their offerings are opaque to her. Built by tech people to be used by tech people, without the benefit of good, solid, onramp documentation, tooling, and user hostile offering design.

Example: don't even try to admin Drive with anything less than business Standard, despite the fact centralized file handling is most useful to those with lower data quotas.

The sharing is a mess. And I was horrified that most searches for Google drive administration were either docs that tried to sell you on drive, or internet public drives of individual users who just left stuff out there with personal information in it waiting to get reaped.

At this point, it really frightens me what Google is trying to normalize in computing.

This is the critical bit. If you're happy with a vanilla product where you essentially search for how to access every feature ("how do I make a pivot table?"), Google Suite is for you. I use it for just low-value bags of documents, nothing critical in it at all. I never have a need for special features, and anything I do need I'm confident is actually there because I only use spreadsheets for totally vanilla stuff. I also don't depend on anything being available, so I avoid the pain every time there's an outage.

I think for that kind of service, a few bucks a month is about right.

For anything that needs a higher level of service, you don't really want to rely on a business whose strategy revolves around minimal customer interaction.

They offer a more enterprise option, I believe. CODE is more the development track.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

Extremely frustrated with Google Shopping ads. I can’t understand how they make money. Spent an hour trying to figure out how to:

- Add custom UTM parameters (can’t unless with a manual feed, it looks like) because Google doesn’t doesn’t seem to track shopping ads unless you install extra JS events and modify google analytics

- Change search queries that products come up for (after deeper research, look like you can’t - again, handled by the data feed but your product title must be now SEO’d to all heck to hit the right keywords. Good luck if you have an original product name)

- Fix the product disapprovals (their bot was too dumb to understand how to navigate native shopify variants, it keeps seeing a mismatch between a variant and its price… and this is the data feed that Googles own app in Shopify generates!)

- Understand why the shopping ads dashboard in Google and the in-Shopify google shopping ads dashboard show different product disapprovals... just why? Genuinely confused here.

It’s ridiculous. It wasn’t this hard a few years ago. In the quest to add more ‘automation’ and ‘smartness’ they’ve made it so dumb and so bad it drives me up the wall.

It reminds me of the time when a friend tried to do Google’s recommendations for “smart” ads and it optimized his local North Carolina health store ads to ads for dieticians targetting neighboring states, because of a few logical algorithmic leaps of “well this is what other users see success with, with ads like yours.” He wasted a few hundred dollars and time fielding confused calls, until we reverted the campaign, turned all the recommendations off and made it a simple, dumb but effective campaign.

What a joke. A horribly infuriating joke played by a group of product managers and engineers. They are literally leaving so much money on the table because the platform is so unusable (speaking for experience: I regularly have people turn to me asking for help setting up their ads because they can’t make heads or tails of it).

I use Chrome for work and Safari as my personal browser and the amount of FUD created by Google is almost hilarious. In 90% of cases it's just a small glitch (e.g. a piece of UI looking a bit shitty on Safari), but in the remaining 10%... I get spiking CPU usage to the point where I could start frying eggs on my MacBook.

I still prefer my browser being occasionally sluggish when using Google services to the ad-infested cesspool my parents' Chrome is.

OK, my Safari can get a bit slow when using Gmail, but at least I'm not browsing the web through a storefront.

Because things break.

I personally would not use Google business products for a startup. They're fine for established shops where when Google fucks up your account, they 'know' who you are. If you're a small-$ nobody, the support policy is "sucks to be you".

But everyone has different risk tolerances and fond feelings for certain companies. More important than that choice is to ask, "what do I do when Google/whoever breaks, or I have to generate a quote and the connectivity is down", and so on.

Speaking of which, is Atlasssian still rebuilding?

In any case, Google has plenty of competition in the areas you're talking about. Try the Office suite + Microsoft Ads.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/

[2] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Google Ads

Google Workspace

All terrible experiences with overly complex UIs and a nightmare to use for small biz.

In terms of competitors, MS and Zoho the big ones are actually productivity software companies.

I don't thing that google office suit is bad just that MS is better

That being said I'm contamplating to stop with MS as I have less needs for a good office suit and just use what apple offers

Similarly I hate when people send .docx instead of a pdf with proper forms (and when people print then scan documents, or take photos of their screen to send them instead of a screenshot) etc...

Google by itself does not sell anything more crappier then it's competitors, so I "hate" them equally seeing not much differences between them. Beside that in corporate terms, it's not only a matter of internal choices stakeholders choices have to be taken into account and in the present time it's no less tedious avoiding Alphabet than using it, unfortunately...

  Fastmail for email
  Github for code, actions, registry and projects management
  Discord for comms
  Obsydian + Git for notes
  Cloudflare for domains, analytics
  Hetzner Cloud for hosting

Just don't touch Teams and you'll be OK.

- It forces the discrete GPU for no apparent reason

- I cannot be in multiple teams, which is terrible to freelancers

- It has no AppleScript support compared to the excellent support of all other office apps, nor System Events

- Having connectivity issues with calls where Hangouts (or whatever it's called nowadays) just works fine

I'm in multiple Teams by being on $WORK on my laptop and in a VDI instance for $CUSTOMER

Honestly: never had a use for AppleScript ...haven't found anything I've wanted to automate on my Macs for the last decades

The calls issue is the only thing that's ever a hiccup ... and it's rare (and when it does hiccup, it's on my end (ie Zoom doesn't work either)

I mean at the end their products are good. My theory is they are biased by statistics, where normally Google culture might be tolerant of issues to .1% of users here and there (which is still millions of users) but at their scale, when this becomes a culture it adds up fast. But that fail-fast culture is also crucial to being innovative without costing a lot of money.

#1 reason why I will never use GCP. With regards to their advertising services, last year their support took a grotesk turn - or account managers told us, that we have to create tickets to get help (which in fact mitigates the need of having account managers in the first place)

Compared to Amazon is interesting.

On Amazon.com I had a tricky high value return that really would take some thought to see I was owed the funds (some shipment mess with tracking issues). Someone worked it out and I got my money (maybe they looked at 10+ years of pretty high use with few returns in this).

And AWS dev support used to be good too (haven't tried recently).

Naming or using the "hater" word in the sentence does not make us in the right side of the story.

Considering users of other search engines as Haters does not sound right.

You think is the best, fine. Recently today, in this network, there is an analysis about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31020229

That wouldn't solve most of your problems, but on my M1 MBP I very rarely get any freezes with Sheets, and I often have thousands of rows there.

> I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

Microsoft Office is still a big player, and I personally really like the 365 ecosystem.

Before I made the payment, i can always get through their cell phone, after I made the payment, there is no human tech support. And they own me 500 CNY.

I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease.

Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite.

I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)

*I'm not a power-spreadsheet user these days and every now and then I run into some very specific thing I can do in Word that I can't do in Docs--or it's easier to use word for compatibility with someone else--but for the most part I much prefer using Google day-to-day.

There was that time I went and gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give the same talk in Ithaca and had an eagle-eyed web developer note an error in a chart I made with Excel because of the broken defaults.

There are numerous ways people get wrong answers with Excel, plus Excel does some really strange stuff to hide the fact that

  0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3

There is something brilliant in the spreadsheet model, namely, it frees programming from the need to sequence operations in some particular order. The CS community has seen relaxing this as a way to find parallelism for the CPU & friends but not so much as a way to take a burden off the programmer who might not need to think about it.

However there is quite a bit structurally inadequate about Excel from the grid model which doesn't necessarily fit the problem and no support for software eng practices to make complex sheets that really work.

And you can choose an arbitrary level of precision: https://discourse.inflex.io/t/how-to-increase-decimal-places...

RE the grid I agree completely, I have a blog post about it: https://inflex.io/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-grid

I’ve considered adding floating points as an optional advanced feature, but on the other hand, unums might also be a better approximate number type.