The mistake is to think that Google reliably stores data when in fact there is absolutely no contractual obligation for them to do so.įor cloud backup of anything, even moderate quantities of documents, i've never trusted Google in the least despite its size, even aside from its grotesquely parasitic "privacy" policies (a complete joke of a word for anything to do with that company). But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup. Always make offsite backups!Īt the end of the day you are right of course. If they provide a storage system that does not reliably store data, they should put a big fat warning label on every single one of their products that uses this storage system:ĭo not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job. My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. It doesn't matter whether you call it backup or cloud storage. Why were these features introduced in the first place if not to provide some of the features that backups have traditionally been used for?Ĭlearly, what happened here should not have happened. The line between backups and live data has become somewhat blurred since file versioning was intruduced to protect against overwrites and deleted files can be recovered. That being said, I understand what the Google Drive team is going through here & as long as they are aware, the support threads aren't going to be useful until they root cause the issue & hopefully fix what happened. Yes it costs some money, but in practice not that much & there's non-monetary value you can extract doing that that offsets that cost. My counter here is that I viewed the entire class of non enterprise customers (free tier or tiny customers not paying for support) as a whole class that's 1 enterprise customer in aggregate. Google engineers just don't care & there's no incentive structure at Google to improve things + Google management probably views this as "these people aren't paying us enough & engineering time is expensive". When I was at Cloudflare I engaged directly with the external community moderators on Discord and made sure they felt comfortable DM'ing me or mentioning me if they wanted to escalate a thread to my attention (this is separate from them having formal community manager contact points which I'm sure Google does). I think that's because Google teams are failing to engage properly with the community volunteers. Perhaps there's an exception to new market entrants from big players, but that's not nearly enough to justify the economic cost. In practice, advertising almost always favors entrenched players over new market entrants. If I know, from advertising, that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, and Microsoft has additional generic brand recognition, you're at an even greater disadvantage. If Microsoft builds a SaaS, you build a better SaaS, but you have $50k to advertise, and Microsoft has $500M, there will be a gap in consumer perception, in favor of the inferior player. To the contrary, advertising strongly favors entrenched players with money: ![]() In those contexts, writers select for products which are interesting or which work well. The most effective ways to learn about new products are things like trade journals (including ones like Hacker News), blogs, etc. That's the standard argument made: Consumers learn about new products through advertising. > But I do think there might be an economic argument in favour of at least some advertising to bring awareness of new market entrants, and especially of new categories of product/service. On average no understanding.Īnother problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. For a minor explanation, support is just prohibitively expensive no matter what you do, and quite frankly the only people actually capable of support is going to be the devs who made the product for various bugs/issues, and that is just a handful of people, some of whom have left the company even.įinding good support is also hard.
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