[cpunks]

With Amazon, we have a business support contract. The first-line phone operators are pretty bad -- they're neither technical nor fluent in English -- but we've been able to work up to competent people pretty quick in the one emergency we've had since launching. Both organizations are courting us pretty hard, so we may be a special case.

Google is a little weird. They've insisted on e.g. a conference calls with a half-dozen guys from Google, including one executive-level. That call was entirely one-sided. They told us about all sorts of features they were building because they thought our market segment needed them (zero of which were actually useful to us, and which they could have discovered with even very minimal market research). In that conference call, they didn't listen to any of our bugs or feature requests. Whenever we've submitted support requests through official channels, they went into what was effectively a black hole (sometimes, we'd get a slightly derogatory response from someone clearly powerless and clueless). Things we submit to through high-level contacts get handled -- roughly as well although slightly slower than normal, paid contacts at Amazon. The culture at Google is a little weird, at least with respect to dealing with large customers.

We do use Google Apps internally. It's imperfect and has showstoppers, but in my experience, corporate IT departments are even more imperfect, and have even more showstoppers. Based on our experiences, I'd be absolutely terrified of using Google for anything customer-facing.