I think this is a terrible idea because it makes people check 2 places and 
subscribe to 2 boards. Newcomers to this discussion will have a hard time 
knowing about this.

App Engine team does put enough resources for community and customer 
support. I have a paid app and I cannot get my simple billing questions 
answered. In the billing interface, there is no link or phone # to use. 
Just a link to this forum... unless we pay become a Premier Account for 
$500 / month but first we need to talk to the sales team. Really? So 
desperate users in need of urgent help post questions on forums and if they 
make enough noise and show enough distress, others users help them and 
sometimes, in with their immense goodwill and too little available time, 
Google Engineers help too.

Google App Engine team says, 'well support is best effort around here or 
get a Premier Account'. I think this is not the way to do it. Together with 
Google engineers, WE make Google products what they are because of our deep 
involvement. 

This lack of support is general across most Google products. Our company 
uses many Google products that are now business critical for us: Google 
Apps for Business, Checkout, Analytics, and more. With all of those, if you 
have a problem, well, it's your problem because you cannot contact anyone. 

So is it hard to provide good support? Not for every company. We use Amazon 
S3 and Cloud Service. We are a little tiny customers for them. The other 
day we had a problem that brought down our SaaS app. Emergency. What do you 
do when that happens? Well, simple. On Amazon AWS console, click on 'call 
me I need help now' button and a human calls you within a minute. 

So Google: use a tiny portion of the immense net revenue to add more 
community and product support engineers. I bet that will improve the bottom 
line even further.

One last BIG concern. One of the things that first get dropped when a 
product is going to be retired (i.e. killed) is developer and community 
support. Java and Python appengine discussion groups are being deprecated 
and dev support is moved to Stack Overflow. That does not sound like App 
Engine is going forward to me. More like a huge red flag. Is App Engine 
business in danger?

Telling Google users to use Stack Overflow is the equivalent of displaying 
a big sign on Google Groups home page saying "use Stack Overflow, it's much 
better than what we have".

As other users suggested, Google should improve this forum software and 
make it work more like Stack Overflow and not move there... 




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