Posted by agwa 11/3/2025
They do not want "slightly less money", they want as much money as possible
As far as I can see they are still living a bit off the "do no evil" of ages ago and latent animosity towards Microsoft, but they're creating an animosity that will take ages to erase unless they start putting some minimal amount of money into customer support today.
Blaspheme!
The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital: https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/the-great-decoupling-of-labor-... explains this with numbers: Alphabet required 76k employees to get to their first $100 Billion. Their most recent incremental $100 Billion? Just 11,000! (assuming they add another 3k employees in 4Q’25)
Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.
That might just be me though.
But it adds a human interaction and that costs money so… no! Suspend.
Sucks.
I don't like this. I too have looked like an attack on their models using things inside the customer-side of google, took special relationships to get over this, an ongoing threat to how we relate to them.
(it's not in GCP btw. different arc of the megaplex)
I'm not in favor of going to court, but if it does a lawyer doesn't have be very good to think of the above.
They’re too big and no one has the authority to clean it up. I’m honestly shocked we don’t see more account suspensions.
I’ve migrated my businesses to Microsoft’s cloud offerings and they’re also a clusterfuck, but at least I can get real support people on the phone pretty easily (for now…).
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-ac...
I gave it a try -- Google offered a free tier vps which was a no brainer. It worked but the ui seemed jank and somewhat confusing. The cost wasn't particularly compelling, so I never deployed. I kept the free tier VPS running for a while to continue evaluation since I value a diversity of services.
However, google charged me like a dollar, and i never saw the charge since i never logged into the webui. I never got an email saying I owe them a dollar so they canceled my GCP access and blacklisted my google account from GCP.
There was a lot of friction here, and the fact that i "feel lucky" I didnt lose my very old gmail account over $1.00 makes me laugh...a very nervous laughter.
I like a lot about google. I cannot depend on google. I use google's AI offering and I am slowly becoming concerned it could affect my legacy email account. Like, everything gets locked and my doctor cannot email me.
Note that doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself, there are plenty of hosting places that you can just configure with your own domain name details.
Some things are still using this email. Hey, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I exceed posted speed limits, too.
Edit: I have to choose a tech giant to get a phone app with decent push notifications as far as I can tell (I haven't scoured the earth for this .... yet) The gmail app is pretty good.
Here are options I can recommend: Proton Tuta Apple (iCloud)
All of these withh be your MX with DMARC/SPF. If you use an android cellphone you'll almost certainly need a google account anyhow. The tuta experience is not as advanced as the others, but is servicable and likely offers better security guarantees than the others. You get a lot of bang for your buck from Proton (personal wireguard tunnel vpn included), and apple is apple.
Simple example - in the early days of Microsoft Office, every new release would cause office confusion. I learned to say "it's the same product, they just moved things around". My conspiratorial sense was that the confusion was intentional to make users feel lost.