[avree]

Anthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.

[Master_Odin]

They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.

[kryogen1c]

Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:

Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.

Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.

[lmm]

> They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.

No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.

[xico]

Google and Meta are both Advertising companies.

If we want to decrease a tiny bit the insane imbalance in societies we need to have a strong discussion about taxing advertising.

[dijksterhuis]

netflix is tv/film licensing. [0]

facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]

contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.

welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.

[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)

[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised

[evan_a_a]

place this alongside the classic "mcdonalds is a real estate investment firm"

[the_other]

Today? Not 23 years ago (approx) when they started scanning emails?

[ricw]

Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.

It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.

[strictnein]

Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.

If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.

[rrr_oh_man]

$100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".

[mjcl]

At least AWS will send people out to your office to tell you which services you aren't using but could.

[iammrpayments]

I heard facebook is even worse

[rhettsnaps]

Facebook = Faceless

Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees

TikTok = TimeWaste

Robinhood = Rob The Hood

OpenAI = ClosedAI

[ryoshu]

Even if you spend a crazy amount of money with them for advertising they will try to gaslight you if they make a mistake.

[StableAlkyne]

Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.

It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.

[smt88]

Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.

[user34283]

It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.

Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.

[alfiedotwtf]

To this day I still try to use Google as little as possible all because they killed Google Reader

[blacksmith_tb]

Is that reason customer service? My only experiences with AWS along those lines have not been great...

[PunchyHamster]

Mostly coz of everything else about GCP

[GenerWork]

This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?

[snaking0776]

I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.

[itsthejb]

Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking

[mothballed]

We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.

[jack_pp]

In the good old days of 2011 when I started to learn C++ "for real" I did it using learncpp.com, google and "support" from freenode's #c++ where truly masterful wizards would help me with the most inane questions. I don't think anything I've ever found has come close to freenode's level of "support".

In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.

[cwnyth]

I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.

[cwnyth]

I went a-looking and found a very old website of mine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalg...

You can see all the C fora I frequented. A later snapshot of this website pointed to EFNet. Good times.

[hluska]

Back in the day, comments like this would not have been acceptable here. It’s low brow, unbelievably stupid, adds absolutely nothing and yet still manages to make you sound just a little racist. Good for you, all that on less than fifty words.

[mothballed]

You're absolutely right. "Back in the day" (looking at your account, it was created in the 2010s), roughly 2010-2020, was the high water mark for politically correct moral proselytizing.

Your kind has lost the plot, your lies disinfected by the sunlight, and society is progressing back towards tolerating a bit more candid and colorful language. This is especially true with the latest generation who saw the effects of this overly paranoid policing of speech. It's a glorious thing. I am absolutely taking advantage of the fact that I can speech more freely nowadays.

[bonesss]

When you mention it, providing superlative front line customer support sounds like a perfect fit for organizations selling “AI” solutions…

Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>

[awesome_dude]

In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model

[yu3zhou4]

Maybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?

[pdpi]

A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.

[yu3zhou4]

Good idea, too! Why do you see my explanation as cynical, though?

[pdpi]

Your explanation is literally "blame somebody else, shift responsibility". It's a pretty straightforward case of assuming bad intentions.

Obviously, I don't know for a fact what Anthropic's motivations are, but I don't believe I'm being overly optimistic because I know for a fact that "use a third party as a way to de-risk" is a tried and true strategy. E.g. when I was at Facebook, all regular day-to-day comms were on Workplace, but they kept an IRC server hosted by some vendor or other, specifically to coordinate responses for serious SEVs that disrupted the normal channels.

Of course, an even simpler explanation is that they perceive building their own support harness as just low value work for engineers who could be working on their core product instead, and the cost of buying that service from somebody else is probably a drop in the ocean.

[irthomasthomas]

A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.

[lwhi]

That makes good sense

[kashunstva]

> that's how little support matters to them

I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai

At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.

[conception]

Huh? Why wouldn’t they just spin up the current help-desk darling? (Intercom) Rolling their own seems silly.

[stevenally]

"Rolling their own seems silly".

But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?

Hence the SAAS apocalypse...

Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....

[hluska]

The sarcasm is neither funny nor well written. Nobody will care.