Google to App Engine customers: Don’t call us, we’ll call you

When was the last time you knocked off work at 6 p.m.? If you’re a developer or an IT hand, you probably can’t remember. But if you’re a Google App Engine customer and need help at, say, 6:01 p.m., you’ll find that customer support is closed. If support were free, that would certainly be understandable. But App Engine customers who opt for the $500-a-month Premier service, are no better off — support stops at 6 p.m. Pacific time for them, too. (It reopens at midnight, leaving a six-hour gap.) Got a problem on the weekend or a holiday? Sorry, nobody’s home.

How come a company that earned $2.5 billion in just three months this year can’t provide decent customer support to business or consumers? Google blew it when it launched the Nexus One Android smartphone with no provision for support. It also angered small-business owners who find they can get no help when some clown alters their Google Places listing to fool people into thinking they are out of business. Now it’s shortchanging companies that use App Engine to supplement meager in-house resources. See the pattern?

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App Engine, which has 200,000 customers, according to Google, is hardly the high end of cloud services. But neither is Amazon Web Services, where customers who pay just $400 a month can get round-the-clock support.

Making matters much worse, Google last spring raised App Engine prices significantly, leaving some developers complaining. When I asked Google about this, the company ducked the question, saying only that it offers premier support service during business hours in the United States and Europe “and looks forward to expanding coverage in the future.”

The dream is dead Google’s Jessie Jiang, a group product manager, announced the support options in his blog on Tuesday: “So today, we are launching Google App Engine Premier Accounts. For $500 per month, you’ll receive premier support, a 99.95-percent uptime service level agreement, and the ability to create unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.”

If downtime falls below 99.95 percent for a month, Google customers can obtain credits toward future monthly bills. That’s a bit different than Amazon.com’s agreement, which offers a service level of 99.95 percent over the service year, and better than Microsoft’s Windows Azure’s 99.5 percent uptime promise. (However, I wouldn’t hold up Microsoft’s cloud services as a model of reliability, not after a major September outage.)

According to Google’s guidelines, customers must try to fix problems themselves before contacting support, then submit a written request for help. If the issue is considered a priority, meaning a problem that affects customer operations, Google says it will respond within four hours. That doesn’t sound very good to me. After all, four hours is a big chunk of a business day. I’m not sure how many companies use App Engine for operational functions, as opposed to developmental ones, but those that do can’t be very happy about losing that much business time.

Google’s support announcement come just a few months after a hefty price increase for App Engine customers, an uptick that left more than a few steamed customers. As my colleague Savio Rodrigues noted, the Hacker News and Google Groups message boards dedicated to App Engine are filled with developers complaining about dramatic cost increases of 50 percent to more than 2,800 percent. Is anyone surprised by what the customer that got socked with a 28-fold increase decided to do? “We are moving 22 servers away. Already started the process to move to AWS.”

I was impressed with the balanced view expressed by Ted Hoff, an active developer, who wrote in his blog, “The dream (of pay for what you use) is dead. Everyone will pay more. And that’s not wrong. Googlehas every right to make money. It’s the speed of the change, the direction of the change, and the magnitude of the change that has thrown people for a loop. Selecting App Engine was a leap of faith, and much of the anger is because many feel that faith has been betrayed.”

I agree. Google shouldn’t lose money on its services once they are out of beta. But if you’re paying $500 a month for so-called premier service and can get help only part of the time — and slowly at that — Google simply isn’t giving customers good value.

Google does many things really, really well. But customer service isn’t one of them. Google can’t support the billions of people who use its search engine. But 200,000 developers? Give me a break. This company needs to grow up if it wants to be a serious player in business.

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This article, “Google to App Engine customers: Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.