Anyone can get Google support with Google One [0] for as low as 2$ a month (along side 100GB of storage).
The issue is people expect free products they haven't paid a penny for to have live customer support, which doesn't make much sense at the billion user scale.
Anecdote on the other side - Small customer (~5k/mo google cloud / firebase spend). They're support has been decent. Sub 24hr email response and technically competent enough to quickly escalate. It was comparable to AWS basic support.
Usually, it's a case of "You get what you pay for".
For GCP, you can get 4-hour response time SLA for $100 per user. If you want 1-hour response SLA it's $250. Then there's Enterprise Support if you need 15-minute response SLA, TAM assigned etc which costs more.
I have as a Fi and as a One customer, and both services had very good customer support. In the half a dozen time I've contacted them, I got someone helping me within a minute and my issue resolved in under 15. That's a normal Google customer though, I can't speak about Cloud, which is an entirely different beast.
In my experience their customer support is poor even if you are a paying customer. It's cultural and it goes right to the top, they don't like interacting with people.
How they're using GCP probably varies a ton. A lot of places are doing multi-cloud for risk mitigation. Maybe some are using it for Kubernetes workloads that they can spread across public/private clouds. Probably a lot like the PaaS products like Firebase for prototyping. I haven't seen any shops that have bet the farm on GCP the way they do on AWS or Azure.
> I haven't seen any shops that have bet the farm on GCP the way they do on AWS or Azure.
Your examples sound a bit biased. Based on your argument, using GCP as part of a multi-cloud solution for risk mitigation could also imply that those clients don't trust AWS or Assure to provide a reliable service, thus they are compelled to use GCP for reliability. Using Kubernetes workloads means that GCP is trusted above any other competing offer to provide a fundamental service. Using GCP's PaaS offers means that GCP is able to better fulfill the client's needs with their enticing higher-level services. Your hypothetical claims ring as true as there statements, but your bias points in a different direction.
You work for Google or something? I've been in an out of a ton of IT departments and I'm just reporting what I've seen. I've honestly never done a real evaluation of GCP as a whole. Only Firebase. From what I've seen first-hand, AWS is the default choice. Azure has substantial market share, particularly among orgs that are already bought into the Microsoft stack. GCP just doesn't have a strong story to tell. I should also say that I pretty commonly see senior IT decision makers just make arbitrary decisions.
> You work for Google or something? I've been in an out of a ton of IT departments and I'm just reporting what I've seen.
I don't work for google, nor does your attempt to switch to personal attacks change any of the points I made. In fact not only do your assertions sound heavily biased, you now admit that you never done a real evaluation of a service you're criticising. Frankly I don't care if X or Y has more market share, but people making baseless assertions regarding stuff they have no experience or knowledge in simply add noise to a discussion that's expected to be insightful.
I didn't say anything about GCP's quality and I don't know why you think I'm demeaning it. I'm just saying I have not seen any IT org that was heavily invested. I have seen a bunch using this or that feature (Firebase or AI/ML services) enough to be mentioned as a client but none that use it as their primary infrastructure. My point being that just because they have an impressive list of clients doesn't mean they're winning anything. And winning is not necessarily correlated to the quality of their product.