Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.
Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.
I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.
For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.
Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
> Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
No, that's exactly their focus. You got a lot of attention regarding the product that you were a customer of, the premium paid apps.
In the other instance, you were the product: a pair of eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. And the advertisers are the customers in that instance.
I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.
For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.
Comments
Here's a personal beef describing how Google places too much emphasis on engineering and too little on the experience paying customers have with its services: Google Apps. Support is almost nonexistent for nearly anything that isn't already on their roadmap, the roadmap is set by engineering and not based on customer feedback, the deployment schedule is completely closed and updates frequently surprise domain admins & their users, billing for various services (GSAs, GAPE, Postini) is non consolidated, and various features break at regular intervals. It doesn't help that a lot of their engineering showcases in Gmail -- Labs features -- they pitch and great improvements to Gmail, but offer zero support for. This included Offline when it was in Labs.
Google is a great engineering company, but it still doesn't "get" the enterprise.
I paid for the Premium Google Apps for one of my domains. When it was about to expire, I got emails almost daily reminding me to renew. The day before it was to expire, someone from Google Apps actually called my cell about renewing.
For a different domain that I was using regular Google Apps on, I couldn't get an email response to a support question I sent several months prior.
Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
> Whatever their focus, it's not on customer service.
No, that's exactly their focus. You got a lot of attention regarding the product that you were a customer of, the premium paid apps.
In the other instance, you were the product: a pair of eyeballs they could sell to advertisers. And the advertisers are the customers in that instance.
I should add that they were never so helpful when I inquired from my premium domain in the past. I only received a lot of attention when it was time to renew.
For example, I couldn't figure out how to cancel the premium account, and I sent an email asking. No response ever came.