

Gone Google? Do yourself a favor: don’t. - aliebschner
http://www.indieloper.com/2009/11/18/gone-google-do-yourself-a-favor-don’t/

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aliebschner
If you want a short version of the story, here it is: it took 5 days
(approximatively 150 hours) to get the first reply from the so called “Google
Enterprise Support”. And that’s the good news. The bad news is that most of
the Google products don’t come with any kind of support whatsoever, unless you
are internet famous.

~~~
conover
For some reason I can't get to the article. Anyway as another anecdotal data
point: We have a few Google Search Appliances where I work. When one of them
broke (rather catastrophically) Google Support was on top of it and the
problem was fixed relatively quickly.

Edit: I suppose this is a case of "you get what you pay for". Google Search
Appliances are non-trivially expensive. I guess they wouldn't be able to get
away with bad support for those.

~~~
aliebschner
I threw money (RAM) at the problem and the server is back up, at least it is
now ;-)

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sunchild
You get what you pay for. Google Apps for Enterprise is $50/yr. Not sure what
you pay for feedburner, but the bottom line is that Google doesn't sell
support. You email them and you wait.

If it doesn't work for you, go elsewhere. It's obviously a business decision
they've made by weighing the loss of customers like you against the cost of
carrying a huge hands-on support organization.

~~~
patio11
_You get what you pay for._

It would be much less frustrating if this were the case, actually.
Empirically, $15,000 is not enough for them to routinely return email within a
week. In many businesses, that would be "Yes sir, right away sir, can I get
you a cup of tea while you wait sir" territory.

Plus, from what I've heard, it doesn't get any better for the next two orders
of magnitude, either.

~~~
staunch
$15,000 over the course of how long? To them that's a _very_ small fry. Many
of their AdWords customers spend tens/hundreds of thousands per month. Those
people are getting support.

~~~
netcan
I have had Google give horrendus CS on accounts on that scale. 100k is still
small fry to Google.

But that shouldn't matter. No one is trying to get Eric Schmidt on the phone.
$150k, $15k or even $150 is plenty relative to returning a phone call, which
is what it costs them & what your relative fry-ness should be measured
against.

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NathanKP
The blog only has four posts on it? Why is he even worried about feeds at this
point?

I think this is blown way out of proportion. A new blog like that with only
four posts probably only gets a few visitors a day. He's getting more traffic
over this "controversy" post than he would ever get from a feed.

He should thank Feedburner for messing up his feed because it gave him
something to write about that would bring in traffic. At any rate the loss of
the feed is nothing terrible when you consider how new the blog is.

I tried a hack to find out how many subscribers he has but he has feed
"awareness" disabled.

[https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?...](https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=indieloper)

At any rate, I doubt he even has more than a few subscribers. No wonder Google
didn't consider his "issue" to be high priority.

------
va_coder
I think Rackspace is hitting a sweet spot with hosted email and calendaring
and 24x7 service.

I think there are many niches, yet untapped in hosted services, where the cost
may be a little more than google, but the service may be a lot better (another
example Heroku).

~~~
megamark16
Cost less and give more, that's all it takes to steal customers from a
competitor. Of course "Cost" doesn't just refer to the price, as someone who
has "spent" their time trying to get support from Google can tell you. And
"More" doesn't just refer to features or services, it's about the value to the
customer.

~~~
freetard
I think you mean TCO.

~~~
megamark16
I knew it had a name! :-) Thanks.

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pavs
This is one of the stupidest thing I have read in a long time. Sorry, but
someone had to tell you the way it is. Having hissy fit over a trivial issue
such as feed burner?

Create a new feed to the account you wanted to transfer. make a post about the
update. Readers from all feed will still get your post, because the changes
are not instant. Wait 24 hours. Problem solved.

Assuming you are not the one who made a mistake and deleted your feed. I have
been using feedburner for a long time and transferred my old feeds to google
feeds with no problem.

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petercooper
If you run a site with thousands of subscribers that depends on FeedBurner for
serving feeds, it's a little worrying. There are things you can do to reduce
the pain but it's still a sticky point.

~~~
pyre
Are you saying that it's worrying that Google gives no support for FeedBurner
or that it's worrying that a large site is dependent on FeedBurner?

~~~
petercooper
The former. I can see why my message is ambiguous now, but I'm worried about
sites being at Google's mercy, rather than criticizing them for using a
service that, at one point, was run by a well staffed and very competent team.

As far as Google acquisitions go, FeedBurner was by far the worst IMHO in
terms of really sucking the heart and soul out of a product.

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coreyrecvlohe
You want Enterprise support for Feedburner? LOL. As far as I know they don't
offer that, and I wouldn't have expected it. You're talking about Google
giving support for one of their products which isn't actually covered by their
Enterprise policy, even though you might have had a product that was covered,
the issue you were having was for a product that wasn't.

Their Enterprise Policy explicitly states which are services covered and which
are not.

------
mstevens
Is this loading for other people? For me there's no response.

~~~
aliebschner
hackernews killed the server and it's really FUBAR (can't even ssh to it and
try to fix it) sorry about that [edit: back up now]

