Discussion

Zen Capital Notes

Klaster_1: This should be illegal. Megacorps eat more and more of our life and regular people are increasingly at mercy of these hostile entities. They should be pushed more against. If we can't have proper anti monopoly splits like AT&T, then at least ways to prevent them exerting too much power are long due. If you provide an essential service, responsibility should match that.

pluc: Time since paying Google customers had to resort to social media outrage to obtain decent resolution: 0 daysGood luck to you

loloquwowndueo: Excreting power. What an awesome mental image.“Exerting” would be more correct I guess but less fun.

neom: Funny because I have dyslexia and read excreting power as exerting power, and then had to read your "Exerting" underneath 4 times to understand the mistake. I guess it's the phonics, dyslexia is so weird tho, ha.

shevy-java: "Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions and continue to hold my email hostage."Well, you have become the product here. That also happens by other "free" email providers too. I had this happen to me on inbox.lt; the guy demanded I use a smartphone to "prove" my identity. At that point I realised they want to connect this data to the account and sell it to others who are interested in that.

zenincognito: its $13 per month for a basic plan.

pzmarzly: I guess one way to protect yourself from this would be to use another IAM solution for SSO login to Google Workspace, but is there any reasonable choice for small businesses other than Entra ID or Okta?

samlinnfer: I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft here but it actually has a track record of actually having support, support people that you can talk on the phone with and knows how to navigate the dark corners of their convoluted systems and actually solved my problems (even if it was caused by Microsoft's horrific UI in the first place).

amelius: Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.

masfuerte: An article here a couple of days ago said that the automation behind the scenes in Azure is piss poor and the whole thing is held together by thousands of contractors manually fixing the endless failures.On the plus side, it does mean they have thousands of people who know how to fix problems.

izacus: What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you shitty to the victim?

techteach00: Because his honest and accurate diagnosis for why mega tech corps treat people inhumanely is the first step towards stopping it. In my opinion of course.

faidit: At Google there is one guy who knows how to fix the problem.. he's a monk who is also in 700 different teams and the only one who remembers how the systems were built. You have to climb all the way up to his mountain abode, hope that he is home and pray that he will hear your cries and help you

protimewaster: I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot of ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil big tech players.I gotta say, though, that my experience with trying to get them to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend any money with them.I bought a Pixel phone. It come one with year of Gemini AI Pro. Except, the redemption process to get the year didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.My friend, who bought a Pixel around the same time, also wasn't able to get the year of Gemini they were promised.That same friend has a Google One subscription, billed through their phone carrier. Recently, Google (or the provider?) discontinued that specific Google One plan, as well as the option to bill via your carrier. This was all covered in an email sent to my friend. As consolation, the email explained, my friend was given the option to switch to a different plan, billed monthly by Google (instead of their phone carrier), with 6 months free. Except, the new plan, and the 6 months free, wasn't selectable as a plan type for their account. So my friend emails Google about it and, to my complete lack of surprise, Google was unwilling/unable to provide any resolution.At this point, I legitimately don't understand why, unless I had no other option, I would pick Google for services. They clearly put no real effort into resolving any service issues for any customer that's not spending millions with them.

dotandgtfo: This is one of the goals of the digital services act.

amelius: The EU isn't as bad as some Americans want to believe.

bookofjoe: Once upon a time at Google: The year was 2013, and I'd been selected to be among the first 8,000 people to get Google Glass. I had to go to Google HQ in NYC from my home in Virginia to get it and be instructed 1:1 on how to use it. I was given a toll-free phone number to call for support by a Glass expert, available 24/7/365.Not only did they answer immediately whenever I had even the smallest problem or question: I twice broke my Glass, and each time I'd call the support number to ask for a replacement.Google's policy was that no matter how you broke it or how many times it happened, they'd replace it free. They'd immediately send a box to return the broken device (prepaid) and a couple days later a brand new Glass would arrive.Like I said, once upon a time....

skeeter2020: Any painful automation story feels very different from their customer service. MS has always been superior to their competition with customer service - especially paid service contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late (and reluctantly) to them.

yomismoaqui: The thing here is the 8.000 Glass early adopters vs the hundred-millions (billions maybe?) of Google workspace users.It's not the same league, not even the same sport.PS: Not defending Google here, their support for some products is abysmal

ValentineC: > MS has always been superior to their competition with customer service - especially paid service contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late (and reluctantly) to them.If we're comparing cloud services, surely GCP has customer service? I can't imagine any big enterprise using it otherwise.

olalonde: Adding to the list of bizarre Google Workspace stories: you cannot change your billing country, even with legal incorporation documents in hand. When I tried, support's official "solution" was for me to create an entirely new Workspace instance and migrate everything.

Waterluvian: You were a volunteer employee. The very least they could do is make sure you can keep doing the job.I think organizations have a very hard time staying motivated once the product’s concern has moved away from any one team. While you test the product for them there’s likely people whose jobs depended on you and 7999 others doing so. But eventually a product will be considered shipped and all the various talent now pays attention to what’s next.

walterbell: What's a good alternative to Google Workspace for SMB customers?

samlinnfer: Office365?

0xpgm: Instead of getting more dependant on Big Tech's AI products, I think the perfect use for AI is develop tools and workflows that decouple one from Big Tech.

bookofjoe: You are correct. I agree 100%. It's easy to be great when it's on a tiny scale.

vednig: Been there done that, none of it works, till this date my YouTube account is suspended and they can't do a thing about it.Google Drive & Workspace are their most poorly designed products with the shittiest support ecosystem. Google would rather bleed money than work on it.That's one of reason I started DoShare Personal Cloud[₁][1] https://getcloud.doshare.me

Loughla: Hey do you have certain fonts that are better? I was working with a dyslexic student last week trying to find fonts that work better for his online classes. All the research pointed towards a handful that didn't seem to really improve processing for the student.

cj: Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account instead of IAM users.In my experience Google Workspave support is very good. I’ve always been able to get a knowledgeable person on a call to debug issues without much difficulty.But yea, if you’re locked out of your admin account, that’s another story. Very sjmilar to if you get locked out of your AWS root account. It’s a nightmare to recover.

oybng: This occurs to dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people on a daily basis. It happened to me many years ago. This is your opportunity to escape, instead you cry out here for attention. How pathetic

ValentineC: > Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account instead of IAM users.It sounds like the mistake here is not appointing another Super Admin, and making sure they don't use their account for day to day needs. Or just having two Super Admin accounts controlled by the same person, heh.I can't see how not using one's Super Admin account wouldn't prevent tripping some kind of fraud lockout that's impossible to recover from.Randomly, I just remembered that I lost a GCP account because I tried logging in from Laos, and they asked me for the front and back photos of a payment card that I used ages ago that I didn't bother making scans of before it was lost. Urgh.

r_lee: this is actually scary as fuckI thought with Workspace you'd actually be spared from this kind of BSI guess not?

welder: > I removed my phone number from the account. I am travelling to the UK for a short period and did not want to have roaming on my Australian phone.So for my own notes, removing a phone number from my Google account before travel will risk account suspension. Hope OP resolves it, but also need to make sure this never happens to me.

jimbocyou: OP triggered every possible red flags for suspicious account takeover in Google systems: deleting his recovery phone number, moving to another country and cellular provider. And then he gets surprised that the account is in 30 day cool down period??? I don't understand people sometimes.

Jimmc414: Google needs to understand that watching this nightmare scenario play out over and over again is actively destroying trust in their platform. When your email, authentication, documents, payroll, and CRM all flow through a single provider and that provider can lock you out overnight with no meaningful recourse, you’ve invited customers to place their entire digital presence into a house of cards. The fact that this same story surfaces almost daily should be a wake up call to existing and prospective customers. Every unresolved lockout is one more reason to start planning an exit. Google has led the effort to lower the bar so much that it’s commonplace and somehow acceptable to ghost paying customers who youve locked out or even worse bounce them through a gauntlet of AI chat bots with the illusion that you are even aware of the damage you’ve caused.

tracerbulletx: Yeah, loss of a google account in certain cases can destroy entire small businesses and there's no recourse. In the old world we had extremely deep bodies of case law around utilities and commercial leases and road access, and all kinds of things, but for the digital equivalent it's still the wild west and everyone just throws up their hands like its unavoidable.

Hackbraten: They didn't willfully delete their recovery phone number. They tried to delete a shitty, known-broken 2FA mechanism after they had set up passkeys. Poor UX conflated the two things, so their recovery phone number ended up being deleted. This is 100% on Google.Why the fuck would Google care in which country I live? It's a personal decision, and no corporation should have any say in this. They certainly don't have to flag an account for that, especially not if the account has 2FA enabled. This is on Google, too.Your comment is victim blaming.

brookst: The EU’s heart is in the right place, which can only rarely be said of the US.But the EU’s approach is often backwards. When product managers have to ask the government if it’s ok to ship a feature, something is wrong. When the government responds that it can’t say in advance, you’ll just have to ship and see if you get fined, something is really seriously broken.

Spooky23: [delayed]

EvanAnderson: Microsoft 365 is a reasonable alternative. It's easy to buy and even tiny Customers can get a degree of real human (read: tier 1 is unhelpful contractors that you have to fight thru) support.It's still repugnant to me, as compared to self-hosting, but I would never self-host for a greenfield SMB Customer today. The economics don't make sense and the talent pool of knowledgeable and reasonable sysadmins is dwindling by the day. (I wouldn't want to make a Customer so beholden to me if they were willing to pay for it.)I miss being able to spin-up an on-prem email server on a box with reasonable hardware redundancy, some external USB disks to rotate for off-site backup, a UPS, a couple consumer-grade "business class" Internet connections, and a contracted "backup MX" to catch email in the event of an outage. It was a good enough for a lot of small SMBs who had a physical office, and was cheap.

Lihh27: The economics make perfect sense once "30 days of a suspended business email with no timely recourse" shows up as a line item. That USB disk and a UPS is looking pretty cheap right about now.

fortran77: At least he owns his own domain and can eventually switch over. A few years ago we decided to switch our personal emails from gmail accounts to domains we own (though the email is still handled by google.) This way if we ever lose our google account, we can switch the MX and be able to get all our recovery emails, bank second factors, password recoveries, etc.

l72: They could switch their domain to another email provider and start getting emails, which is great. The problem though, is they also used their Google Account to log in to all the 3rd party services (payroll). I have no idea how you would get back into those services. Some _might_ let you switch off the Google Sign-in SSO, but I imagine that is a headache.

Lihh27: you're paying for the privilege of getting locked out by the same algorithm that locks out free accounts. the only difference is you get an invoice.

e40: This is why I do full Google Takeout every 2 months and have my own domain with Workspace. I don't rely on cloud file storage. The calendar is important, but I could switch easily.IMO, the worst part of this is Workspace support is immune to ANY explanation. I mean, credit card companies are well used to "is this your transaction?" emails.

amelius: If a company is about to produce millions of physical products, I think it is quite ok if they first check with the government to see if that is a good idea.

827a: Google's customer support is interesting. Its definitely a case where you'll sometimes hit pockets of the company where clearly there was someone who made it their life's work to fix this bad reputation they have; while other pockets make it clear that they deserve the reputation.I had a Nest subscription that became a total mess. If you've ever tried to use Nest before, or are coming from a legacy Nest account, and/or also have a Workspace account that somehow got wrapped up in the mess, you'll understand how much of a clusterf Nest is for the Google ecosystem. I had signed up for this subscription on a personal Google account, cancelled it, but was still being charged for it, and the credit card being used made me think it was getting charged on my Google Workspace account (which isn't officially supported, and would never let you sign up for it, but DID share an email address with my legacy Nest account I had migrated into the non-Workspace personal account I was using for Nest).They had to escalate the problem a couple times, which took ~24 hours. Once that happened, their rep had it resolved in minutes, and refunded me two months on the subscription.The biggest piece of advice I can give when dealing with Google is: Never be weird. You cannot ever put yourself in a situation where your account isn't like the other billion accounts they have. If you do, something will go wrong and its rolling the dice on whether you'll ever reach someone who can help you. If you've used Google enough, you know: Their multifactor settings are weird. You cannot set it up exactly how you want; it'll always trigger some auth method you didn't configure but they have "LATENT KNOWLEDGE" you should be able to authenticate with, like a phone number you configured six years ago, or gmail installed on a tablet that's 400 miles away, and you can't turn it off, even on Workspace.My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to do before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there. Even on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing website in their core auth flows.Mess of a company. I hope they invest some effort in improving things, but I was saying the same thing in 2018. They probably won't.

ryandrake: It's been [0] days since the last "Cloud provider banned me and I lost everything" article.Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.Does life just go on, since you don't have anything important hosted there? (Best Case)Do you lose some precious family photos and use it as a tough learning opportunity to stop doing what you're doing? (Next best)Do you lose access to your E-mail and are suddenly not able to do 2FA, reset passwords, communicate with the company or the Internet in any way, and so on, and now have to panic?Do you complain online, hoping that someone in the company sees your post and has the ability to restore your account, which you then continue to use because you learned nothing?Having an online account suddenly suspended is a real, non-zero, but unlikely risk. You should at least have a disaster plan if you rely on these things for anything important. Or better yet, stop relying on them for important things like your identity or precious files!

chromacity: > Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.This is one of the most common sentiments I hear expressed on HN, next only to "if you're not building your software business around Claude Code, you're gonna left behind".

zenincognito: Have backup codes, Passkey, access to the said number, same laptop logged in, phone logged in, recovery email address access and nothing works...

jimbocyou: The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider. There is no way to differentiate, at scale, between an account takeover currently in progress that needs to be stopped immediately to minimize damage, and a legit user deciding to change all his personal info at once.30 day cool down period is a reasonable response, at scale.

Hackbraten: > The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider.Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country they're in?How do you move to another country without changing cellular providers at the same time?

jimbocyou: Of course you can keep your provider. It's called roaming, per OP story: "I am travelling to the UK and did not want to have *roaming* on my Australian phone."For cheaper rates than roaming, typically you install a secondary eSIM for the country you're traveling. 99% modern phones support dual SIM for this reason

Arcuru: If a service offers "Login with Google/Apple/Facebook/etc" you should never do that if they offer a username/password. It just increases the single point of failure. Avoid places that only offer the "Login with Foo" if at all possible (looking at you Tailscale).As an ex-googler, the only reason I was comfortable keeping even my personal email there was because I could reach out internally if there was a problem. I left Google, and left gmail behind too.

gib444: > Avoid places that only offer the "Login with Foo" if at all possible (looking at you Tailscale).Tailscale is the only serious company that I can ever recall offering /only/ third party login. It's bit bizarre on the face of it. Anyone know the reason?

warkdarrior: This is about Digital Services Act, not physical products.

HumanOstrich: I agree with your sentiment, but I wanted to call out that they've always been just as evil as other big tech companies.I think their motto of "don't be evil" was some pretty clever PR.I started questioning it c. 2008 when they ghosted me on resolving an issue with my blogspot site that was a bug in the platform. All I could get was a condescending non-response from a "diamond" volunteer on a forum. They were apparently the gatekeepers to reaching actual support.

protimewaster: I definitely don't think they've ever been super nice, but I still they still have a few much more user-friendly approaches than others. E.g., one of the reasons I bought a Pixel is that Google is one of the only phone makers that manages to have respectable security practices and still respects users enough support them choosing to modify the software on their devices and run alternate operating systems.

pfooti: Make a primary super admin (admin@ whatever) and only log into it for admin purposes. Make an actual user (you@) for day to day line of business work. This has the benefit of making some categories of spear phishing and xsrf attacks harder if the account that gets compromised doesn't have root.

blueboo: Billions in profit may unblock scaling customer support beyond scrappy startup minimumsHowever (and I loathe this logic) if you can get the marketplace to accept that minimal level, and the brand harm is inconsequential, why not pocket the savings

anjel: Those are not matter-of-fact saving, but rather significant savings