I would say that Googlers are painfully aware of this. But the real problem is leadership. It starts with the CEO and various execs. Their employees are still living in the "growth hacking" and highly academic world (at least their engineers) and their execs are drunken with arrogance, convinced their Titanic will never sink. And they may be partially right, it may not sink but it will never regain its former glory. It will rot on the shelf, besides IBM,AT&T, HP and many more.
At its core, alphabet is a services company, it does not sell goods (to the most part). Their board needs to decide if the company should focus on business services or consumer services and replace the executives with people who have experience in that area.
The actual quality of GCP is superb in my opinion. They have a flair for architecting excellent solutions. I prefer GCP over any cloud from a purely technical perspective. Their leaders just don't get that it isn't enough. They're not operating a toy or a museum of technical marvels. Actual people need to use it.
I worked on GCP, left Google about two years ago. Some Googlers are aware of this, fewer care, and fewer still act on it - you sort of have to be an insane employee* to do that.
I saw tickets from high-paying, top-10 customers, go unanswered for days; no one senior enough on the team to answer felt it was more important than the day-to-day, and no one from the support/account executive staff felt they had the authority to demand it.
I see it otherwise. I think solving customer support is crucial to GCP's success, and since I agree with you that GCP is the better underlying product, there is a deluge of money passing Google by, just waiting for the right executive team to start caring about this to pick it up. Kind of like Microsoft pre-Satya.
This is really sad to read. I agree with you that GCP has the superior product. Azure is a fucking joke. AWS sucks but they do respond to feedback and will even get engineers on a call with you if you hit certain edge cases. The level of apathy you describe will very quickly sour users.
I spend around $20 a month on my personal AWS account, and the level of support I've received on the handful of occasions I've needed it has been phenomenal.
I'n guessing that's because AWS support engineers live in eternal fear of ending up on a PIP if I rate them less than 5 stars.
After leaving Google I started working at a startup that runs its production environment on AWS. We debugged an issue and experienced exactly what you're describing: our MSK cluster refused connections. Eventually that was solved by rebooting something on their side. It took less than 24 hours from when we opened a ticket until the issue was resolved, with a few back-and-forth messages between us and the AWS support engineer.
At its core, alphabet is a services company, it does not sell goods (to the most part). Their board needs to decide if the company should focus on business services or consumer services and replace the executives with people who have experience in that area.
The actual quality of GCP is superb in my opinion. They have a flair for architecting excellent solutions. I prefer GCP over any cloud from a purely technical perspective. Their leaders just don't get that it isn't enough. They're not operating a toy or a museum of technical marvels. Actual people need to use it.