[justabystander]

There's also Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support, as well as the unappealable terminations of service. And they're not limited to consumers - some companies have had service terminated leaving them with no recourse.

Google's offerings are as much software as hardware, and having Google drop your account over a misunderstanding and thereby disabling all your laptops for several weeks would be a nightmare. Many of the people in charge of making purchasing decisions will have this type of concern in mind.

Whether they can turn that around and make a strong enterprise support channel is a valid question. But it's going to take some strong sales and tech to get people to risk trying it out. Google's a great company as long as you don't have to actually talk to anyone. Which makes them wholly undesirable for companies that obsess over the number of nines in their reliability.

[KGIII]

In another lifetime, we bought a Google Search appliance. It never did work as well as they said it did. The support was pretty good, for the first month. After that, it got more sparse and less helpful. Reaching someone on the phone was not easy. We weren't the only people to notice this and complain.

It's just an anecdote, so weigh it appropriately. I've absolutely no idea if they have improved.

[euyyn]

What's a Google Search appliance?

[brianwawok]

https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html

[sjwright]

That's season 3 of Silicon Valley right there.

[theptip]

Just to add a counterpoint to this experience report, I use GCP and pay for their support, and have found it to be generally great (with some variability in quality of SE).

I understand that this isn't the experience that folk have with every Google product, but I suspect that any enterprise support would hook into their GCP support platform.

Concerns about "turning off your account" are certainly valid, though you that's something that Amazon or any other SaaS vendor could do with (I've seen a few nightmare reports over the years, though they seem to be the exception not the rule).

[evgen]

There is a big difference between supporting cloud services and hardware deployed at a customer end point. Google has a history of providing mediocre at best support for the latter.

[theptip]

I was referring to the GP comment:

> There's also Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support, as well as the unappealable terminations of service... some companies have had service terminated leaving them with no recourse. Google's offerings are as much software as hardware, and having Google drop your account...

That's directly referring to cloud services/software support, not hardware support; I'm not making any claim about the latter.

[cptskippy]

> having Google drop your account over a misunderstanding and thereby disabling all your laptops for several weeks would be a nightmare.

This I think will be the biggest challenge. I've never heard of Microsoft disabling software or cancelling support if by some stroke you were audited and failed. The matter is handled outside of normal business operation.

[dannyr]

> Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support

My experience is not the same for all the products I bought for Google.

It was really easy to contact support and replacement devices came quickly.

[kuschku]

We're in Germany, and have tried for 4 months to get my sister's Nexus 5X repaire d or replaced. The damage was caused by a third party, who is willing to pay for repair or replace.

So far, so simple.

It's been 4 months of calls, emails, faxes, and sending the device back and forth between Google, LG, the insurance, and the repair facility.

Google says they're not responsible for Nexus devices, so we should talk to LG. LG says they're not responsible, we should talk to Google. We got someone at LG to discuss this, and they told us to send it to their official repair facility. They just sent it back because of a typo on the form, or because the insurance didn't say fast enough that they'd fund it, or because "dunno".

We've now taken the device to Media Markt to get it repaired, and it took 2 days.

Never ever are we going to buy a device from Google again.

[joshuamorton]

Odd, it took me a single phone call to get my 5X replaced when it started bootlooping. I called Google, and they replaced it well out of warranty after a 20 minute phonecall.

(disclosure I work at google but this was before I started)

[kuschku]

That may be fine if you get a warranty replacement, but even if you want to pay, getting a repair is basically horror.

This is now the second time we’ve had this odyssey with Google (the Nexus 7 2012 being the first case), and by now it’s obvious it’s not a problem with the OEM, but Google.

[Mindwipe]

Google are reasonably responsive on hardware issues, the problem is software ones. Google have significant issues closing or limiting accounts with no support or recourse to find out what the problems are and resolve them (if they're even real). Given the reliance ChromeOS has on Google accounts that's a huge problem. Eminently fixable from Google's end, but a problem today.