[johnjhayes]

I get what you're saying, but Google's history here is atrocious, which is why business' are skittish, people aren't just going to take their word for it. You go first, if you and 100 others have a good experience maybe that attitude will change. Until then, hard pass.

[TheAceOfHearts]

FWIW, I think Google has been turning things around for their paid services. I've had to contact Project Fi customer support a few times, and found it vastly superior to all previous experiences with telcos. They're also probably getting a ton of experience in dealing with enterprises thanks to GCP.

With that said, this announcement doesn't look like it has any relevance to regular consumers. I'm gradually migrating as many things as possible away from Google, having realized that I'd have no recourse if they locked me out my accounts. Their TOS [0] says services can be terminated at any time. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we had a guaranteed grace period for migrating away upon your Google Account being terminated. IANAL though, so maybe I missed something?

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

[koheripbal]

I manage several GSuite accounts. The tech support staff is friendly and helpful, but if the problem is outside their list of known issues or current outages, they're basically useless. They aren't developers and they have no access to investigate underlying system data/logs, let alone resolve anything.

...and that's where the true problem with Google is. There's no mechanism to report/escalate a well-defined and reproducible technical bug - even as a technical sysadmin with a paid account. ...and if a data issue only impacts a small number of people, it'll never get fixed.

The GSuite forums are bombarded with usability questions, and real tech issues are given the old "let's see which FAQ I can post to get some karma" response.

Calling the help desk might get the issue escalated, but it's far far more time consuming than if I could just put a normal bug report together with a screenshot.

[victorhooi]

Hi,

I actually work in the GSuite support organisation you refer to .

Firstly, I'm sorry if you feel that you weren't provided with an appropriate level of support. Or that troubleshooting took inordinate effort/time on your part.

Secondly, you probably know this, but there are multiple tiers of support - and there are meant to fairly well defined paths for escalation. Obviously the front line is very much basic initial troubleshooting for the average user - the products cater to a fairly wide range of technical skills/background.

Feel free to reach out to me anytime if you want - my HN username at <company that makes Chrome> dot com.

[corobo]

Likewise I've never had a problem contacting someone at Adwords. I've spent like £200 total as well so I'm not exactly a big business spender.

[djsumdog]

They are, and it comes down to a time/cost thing. Yes, you can roll your own infrastructure, domain and manage your Win/Mac laptops (which most places already do) or you can see if using Chromebooks can save on employees that don't need full laptops.

But most likely you're still going to need that AD or LDAP managed infrastructure because several roles aren't going to be able to get by with a Chromebook (not something I could see my self doing Scala development on personally).

And then it comes down to, what's the point? You're either already securing your company data and backing it up or you're already using hosted services for everything (Office365, GitHub Enterprise, Dropbox Enterprise, etc)

I agree it seems like more Google lock-in and for something so terribly simple too. I mean except for things like the managed app store, you could just get some really cheap Linux laptops and you'd get the same end result.

[bardworx]

Well, from my understanding PWC switched to Google for Business so I guess large corporations are not skittish.[0]

Also, Google does offer support, usually via a third party plus fanstastic Google for Business (G Suite?) support, as well, in my experience.

[0] http://www.pwc.com/us/en/increasing-it-effectiveness/google-...

[jlgaddis]

> ...so I guess large corporations are not skittish.

You're basing that off of a sample size of one?

[brewdad]

It is a part of PWC's core business to recommend such changes to their client businesses. Their Google experience could make or break corporate attitudes towards paid Google services.

[bardworx]

how about Salesforce, HP, and a few others....

https://gsuite.google.com/customers/