Who wants to be in a group (organization) to open a GAE Premier account?

[Andrius A]

As you know we all have problems with GAE, lots of issues and unanswered questions and Premier Account costs a lot for a single developers or startups.

What about if we create a independent GAE Developers Organization and open a single Premier Account? In such a way we could split the cost and have our issues/questions prioritized and use collective power to push things forward.

Let me know who is up for it?!

Regards,

Andrius

[Will]

I'm interested. But the first question is if it complies with the premier account user agreement...

 

Best,

 

Will

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[Andrius A]

It think it should work if we create a single organization. What are your thoughts?

Would be nice to have a comment from GAE team.

[Barry Hunter]

I dont see how its going to work. Everyones apps would need to be
under the same 'Google Apps Account'

There can only be two 'contacts'. So few people would have to be the
point of contact for all requests - another bottleneck/SPOF into the
'system'

All billing for all the apps would go to one person (by invoice). Who
would then have to collect payment from all the partipating
developers.

Pretty sure somewhere that there is a limit ot the number of requests
per month. A shared system will quickly burn though its 'quota'

... and Google would notice pretty quickly, and almost certainly look
unfavorably on the 'abuse' of the system.

[Will]

What Barry said are my concerns, too.

[Andrius A]

hosting applications under premier account for are big community would not work, as it would be difficult to calculate the usage separtly, but I am thinking more about getting various issues resolved and questions answered. 

we could have a small organization and use premier account for education and testing our apps and limit it to 20-30 members? so we could all have a copy of our application running and use it for support?

[zdravko]

I have an idea, please read on ;)

This idea more than illustrates there being a hole in GAE's support of
the little guy. It also points to a possible solution that GAE team
should consider and adopt. What GAE could and should consider is some
form of pooled support for small groups of small users - where the
group itself acts as first support line for filtering out the noise,
such that real issues is what gets to the GAE team. Since even the
GAE team claims that the fee is to cover the costs, there is still
likely the problem of valuable and limited GAE resources being wasted
by support subscribers because they can afford to and not because
their issues are the ones that best utilize those precious GAE
resources. In that sense, requestes from a well filtered source
should be handled free, without any charges - sort of like they are
handled on this group. Just imagine if this group managed to organize
itself better and where it passed onto GAE team only those requests
that it could not answer within the group. Imagine how more
productive and how more valuable the whole experience would be.

On Nov 21, 12:27 pm, Andrius A <andriu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> hosting applications under premier account for are big community would not
> work, as it would be difficult to calculate the usage separtly, but I am
> thinking more about getting various issues resolved and questions answered.
> we could have a small organization and use premier account for education
> and testing our apps and limit it to 20-30 members? so we could all have a
> copy of our application running and use it for support?
>

> On 21 November 2011 17:16, Barry Hunter <barrybhun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > I dont see how its going to work. Everyones apps would need to be
> > under the same 'Google Apps Account'
>
> > There can only be two 'contacts'. So few people would have to be the
> > point of contact for all requests - another bottleneck/SPOF into the
> > 'system'
>
> > All billing for all the apps would go to one person (by invoice). Who
> > would then have to collect payment from all the partipating
> > developers.
>
> > Pretty sure somewhere that there is a limit ot the number of requests
> > per month. A shared system will quickly burn though its 'quota'
>
> > ... and Google would notice pretty quickly, and almost certainly look
> > unfavorably on the 'abuse' of the system.
>

[Gregory D'alesandre]

In order to get a premier account you'll need to go through a corporate credit check (due to being billed offline rather than having a credit card verified) which means you need to be an incorporated entity.  This is likely the biggest issue you'll run into as I'm not sure how many people are willing to form a new company (including absorbing the liability behind it).  Having people outside an existing company asking questions through a single support account would be consider an abuse.  If you are truly interested in exploring this (as in you are ready to incorporate) let me know and I can work with the legal team to determine if we see any issue with it.

Greg

[zdravko]

Greg, can you also work with your bean counting team to determine the
added value of GAE user groups acting as their own first support line
and then passing onto GAE team just the real issues that to some
extent GAE should pay to be informed about in the most concise
possible way. Ask them what they think should be charged to support
such small groups of say up to 100 small users ?

On Nov 21, 12:57 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote:
> In order to get a premier account you'll need to go through a corporate
> credit check (due to being billed offline rather than having a credit card
> verified) which means you need to be an incorporated entity.  This is
> likely the biggest issue you'll run into as I'm not sure how many people
> are willing to form a new company (including absorbing the liability behind
> it).  Having people outside an existing company asking questions through a
> single support account would be consider an abuse.  If you are truly
> interested in exploring this (as in you are ready to incorporate) let me
> know and I can work with the legal team to determine if we see any issue
> with it.
>
> Greg
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Andrius A <andriu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > hosting applications under premier account for are big community would not
> > work, as it would be difficult to calculate the usage separtly, but I am
> > thinking more about getting various issues resolved and questions answered.
> > we could have a small organization and use premier account for education
> > and testing our apps and limit it to 20-30 members? so we could all have a
> > copy of our application running and use it for support?
>

> > On 21 November 2011 17:16, Barry Hunter <barrybhun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I dont see how its going to work. Everyones apps would need to be
> >> under the same 'Google Apps Account'
>
> >> There can only be two 'contacts'. So few people would have to be the
> >> point of contact for all requests - another bottleneck/SPOF into the
> >> 'system'
>
> >> All billing for all the apps would go to one person (by invoice). Who
> >> would then have to collect payment from all the partipating
> >> developers.
>
> >> Pretty sure somewhere that there is a limit ot the number of requests
> >> per month. A shared system will quickly burn though its 'quota'
>
> >> ... and Google would notice pretty quickly, and almost certainly look
> >> unfavorably on the 'abuse' of the system.
>

[Andrius A]

Thank you Greg for commenting. Actually in previous reply user zdravko better than me explained the problem we all are having. Do you think you could talk with your other teams and advocates and come back with the solution to support little guys?
I will still think about about forming a company/organization.

[Gregory D'alesandre]

This group and stackoverflow are essentially the solution you are referring to.  There are a number of people in the group that respond to the majority of questions and when something seems like it is a true issue someone from the App Engine team starts looking into it.  The main difference between this forum and premier support is that there is no guaranteed response time.  That's the basic idea of course but it sounds like you don't feel like it is working.  How would you envision it working differently/better than this group does?

Thanks,

Greg

[de Witte]

What about a ticket system with premier support. I would pay 200$ if an issue needs to be solved per direct.

For example, two months ago, we had a stuck index and had to wait 2 days before it was solved.

[Andrius A]

Greg,

before giving any visions, can you please answer the following questions:

1) Honestly, how confident your team is with current GAE release? 100%?

2) Do you/your team think/know that there is issue with providing support to dev community?

3) From scale 1 (less important) to 10 (most important) how important for your company is to support us as dev community?

4) Do you have full time dedicated people working to support us, reading these mail groups? If so, how many people?

5) Do you have any plans to increase/dedicate more people to support the community?

6) Did you try to determine how many disappointed developers do you have with the service you provide? If so, did you try to find out the reasons?

7) Do you measurethe production issues left unanswered (per week, month)?

8) Do you have any procedures you tell to your developers how to assist us? If so, can we know the key ones?

9) Do you have someone senior monitoring our emails and your support members answers to mail groups/forums?

These answers could show what is the current situation, so we can then make the further suggestions.

Thanks,

Andrius

[Bob Dohnal]

Hello all

I am just a casual watcher of the GAE community, but according to this thread I have to reply with my experience about Google Support. 

I am doing business with other Google teams in enterprise segment - and trust me - GAE team's approach to customer support is the best of what I have seen from Google.

You post a question in a public group and you get a reply directly from GAE team member within an hour?! For free? heh... I would pay thousands to have this with other Google products...

Just a note to a single question from Andrius post:

4) Do you have full time dedicated people working to support us, reading these mail groups?

I would not ask for this. You are lucky you can talk to a real team member. Any support guy will get used to customers complaints, is trained to how to deal with objections, etc.

Googlers are just a regular people as we are. You read this group, I read this group, they read this group. Would you expect anything else?

Cheers from Europe

[Brandon Wirtz]

Yes. GAE even free support is 1Billion with a B times better than say Adsense.  Even than adwords.   Adsense still owes clients about 50k and they respond only by email only once every 5 days, and they keep changing when they will pay. But for the inconvenience in a month from now they will pay 5% more than the amount they can’t determine they owe.   If you can’t get support on $50k something is wrong.

 

GAE you can get support of Free.  That’s a huge improvement.

 

Now in 3 years when the product is in sustainability and all our friends in the group have moved on… It will likely go back to the way it is with all the other products.  So enjoy it while it lasts, and quit complaining or those team members will put it in sustainability and move on to something more fun like Google Dots, or Google Cars, or Google teleportation. 

 

Based on the 99.5% reliability I’m not buying Google Cars or Teleportation just for the record…. I need to not die less than 5 out of 1000 trips to the store.

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[Andrius A]

I posted around 5 emails, some are few weeks old and it appears I am very unluky because Google didn't reply.

This mail group is not a support, you were really really lucky to get the response, I wonder what happens next time you have a problem.. you will be ringing bells

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[Yoav Amit]

+1 regarding Andrius's questions.

Amazing that you guys have gotten so much used to the bad relations of other Google products, that even the slightest improvement means the world to you (and yes, kudos to the GAE for the improvement).

Other services and companies have a formal email address you can send emails to and receive an appropriate answer. Not an informal forum who's support is given "by favor". And no, it's not for free - it's for approximately the same price we pay as a standard paying GAE customer. Funny we've gotten to a point where support is something we need to beg (or pay an noncompetitive price) for.

Just to note, during GDD I've asked some senior Google representatives about this - All agree that Google is way behind other companies in client support and relations.

 - Yoav. 

--
 - Yoav

[Jeff Schnitzer]

You've clearly never tried developing a Facebook application.  Or something on ElasticBeanstalk.  Or using PayPal.

The support in this forum is astounding.  It's not "you're one of 100 developers working with a hungry 5-person startup" but it's still really good compared to nearly every other customer support experience I have ever had in my entire software development career.

Jeff

I am the 20%

[Yoav Amit]

Wrote a Facebook connect application - agree their support is awful, so I've moved it out of my critical path (if facebook fails, I still have other backup options working and my system can run) - Would love to hear if anyone found a way to have backup options to GAE (eg, Run the debug application on an EC2 server?)

ElastiBeanstalk - can't say that I have.

PayPal - Have. Great support (ok, I'm lying - I have friends pretty up the rank there, so I get my support from them :) ).

I totally agree that there are equally as bad or worse support teams then Google's, but it is still behind competitors. And the fact that everyone is doing something bad, doesn't mean the market leader needs to as well.

BTW, Google:

1. I think many people won't pay $500 for the one in a month question that they have... How about having a pay-to-post forum, which will promise a certain response time, so if I have one "important" question per month I can pay just for it? Would probably 'cover costs'.

2. If I can add a question to the list bellow - How come, looking at the system status on a daily resolution, it seems that all spikes in performance happen at around the same time almost each day, and for about the same time length?

 - Yoav.

[JH]

It would interest me if there was another premium level, one perhaps
that doesn't include support or the SLA. SLA's are more or less
worthless in my opinion. But, the product that interests me is the
ability to pay $ XXX and open as many paid as as I want.. and not
incur a $9/month fee for each.

> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Yoav Amit <amit.y...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> +1 regarding Andrius's questions.
>
> >> Amazing that you guys have gotten so much used to the bad relations of
> >> other Google products, that even the slightest improvement means the world
> >> to you (and yes, kudos to the GAE for the improvement).
>
> >> Other services and companies have a formal email address you can send
> >> emails to and receive an appropriate answer. Not an informal forum who's
> >> support is given "by favor". And no, it's not for free - it's for
> >> approximately the same price we pay as a standard paying GAE customer.
> >> Funny we've gotten to a point where support is something we need to beg (or
> >> pay an noncompetitive price) for.
>
> >> Just to note, during GDD I've asked some senior Google representatives
> >> about this - All agree that Google is way behind other companies in client
> >> support and relations.
>
> >>  - Yoav.
>

> >> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 1:59 AM, Andrius A <andriu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> I posted around 5 emails, some are few weeks old and it appears I am
> >>> very unluky because Google didn't reply.
>
> >>> This mail group is not a support, you were really really lucky to get
> >>> the response, I wonder what happens next time you have a problem.. you will
> >>> be ringing bells
>

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Andrius, I've tried to answers your questions below but at a high level the thing to understand is that (as I've stated before) there is no formal support SLA for non-premier customers.  This group and stackoverflow are places that you can ask questions where the community can answer and periodically the App Engine team will respond as well.  There are well over 150k developers on App Engine, the majority of them are paying nothing or very little, it isn't feasible to try to support all of those developers.  Given the choice between have all users paying and getting a high level of service and many users not paying but some questions go unanswered, we opted for the latter.  We also created premier accounts for developers who need to get answers and are willing to pay what it would cost us to have people ready, willing, and able to answer their questions quickly.  There are suggestions as to additional programs we could provide (such as paying per answer) that we might explore in the future but do not exist today.  This means that if you ask a question in this group it may go unanswered, questions asked belligerently or with very little information to help someone understand the issue are often the ones that are not answered.

Additional information below:

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Andrius A <andr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Greg,

before giving any visions, can you please answer the following questions:

1) Honestly, how confident your team is with current GAE release? 100%?

I am confident that it will work for the vast majority of our users without major issues.  I am not confident that the release is bug-free as anyone who as ever released software will tell you, no release is bug-free.  

 

2) Do you/your team think/know that there is issue with providing support to dev community?

I believe there are people in the community who would like to get a higher level of support, but this will always be the case, no matter how high a level of support is given.  In an ideal world we would be able to answer all questions for all developer all the time, but it would be prohibitively expensive as a lot of the people asking questions do not pay anything for the service.  

 

3) From scale 1 (less important) to 10 (most important) how important for your company is to support us as dev community?

I believe it is incredibly important to support the developers who use App Engine.  By the tone of your question it seems like you feel that supporting the dev community means answering any question that arises in Groups.  In fact there are a wide variety of ways to support those developers ranging from various communication methods to ensuring App Engine is running appropriately and continues to run appropriately.   

 

4) Do you have full time dedicated people working to support us, reading these mail groups? If so, how many people?

We do have full time dedicated people working support for Premier Accounts.  There are a number of people on the App Engine team (including me) that spend a portion of their time supporting developers (again with that caveat that this includes things outside of reading emails in the group).

 

5) Do you have any plans to increase/dedicate more people to support the community?

We are are always evaluating the best way to support the product but we don't disclose externally how many people work on any one particular item partially because the numbers change periodically.

 

6) Did you try to determine how many disappointed developers do you have with the service you provide? If so, did you try to find out the reasons?

We are always trying to stay aware of the current level of satisfaction of our users and the reasons why.  As you can see from the other responses to this thread, while you obviously feel disappointed there are many who do not.

 

7) Do you measurethe production issues left unanswered (per week, month)?

We do track the number of issues we have with production but not the number of production issues in the issue tracker as many are not actual production issues.  We do use it as a way to get indication that many users might are seeing any issue but there are a number of issues that are user error.  The signal to noise ratio is relatively low so we don't track it directly.

 

8) Do you have any procedures you tell to your developers how to assist us? If so, can we know the key ones?

I'm not sure I understand the question.  We do not instruct the software engineers that they have to answer issues but there are a lot of people on the App Engine team that are not software engineers.

 

9) Do you have someone senior monitoring our emails and your support members answers to mail groups/forums?

Yes.  Me.

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

[Phil Burk]

Hello Greg,

Thanks for the explanation. I understand that users who do not pay
should not expect support. That's fair.

But I am in a kind of gray area between freeloaders and premier
customers. I am building a large app and expect to pay big bucks in
the future. Unfortunately I'm still in development mode and haven't
gone over my quota so I am technically a freeloader. But I need some
support before I launch my business app. I think the reason for the
free quota was to encourage folks to build apps that eventually pay.
But it is hard to ramp up to that level without support.

On Nov 23, 4:26 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote:
> We also created premier accounts for developers who
> need to get answers and are willing to pay what it would cost us to have
> people ready, willing, and able to answer their questions quickly.

Maybe you could have a *middle tier* of support. I'm not yet ready to
spend $500/month for premier service. I don't need emergency response
by phone. But I would happily spend $100/month to be on a forum that
gets a response within a day. For example, I am currently unable to
create new apps because of what I think is a corrupted GAE account.
The documented techniques for creating apps work for others but not
for me. So I can't migrate to HDR. I'm stuck and my only option is to
pay $500/month. Ouch.

Having a support option somewhere between "all" or "nothing" would be
great.

BTW, I love GAE and GWT. They rock!

Thanks,
Phil Burk

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the feedback, I can definitely see a need for a middleground of support and it is something we will take under consideration.

Greg

[Brandon Wirtz]

I think you are looking at support the wrong way. Google/Greg can correct
me if I'm wrong... but The $500 a month is to get support for GAE "ISSUES"
not "Development Issues".

What I mean by that. The GAE team has helped me out when I needed an
understanding of how something works behind scenes to predict scalablility.
These were Non-Emergency services that were provided via the forum. They
have also provided best practices support and other "Dev support".

Premier support I believe is supposed to be for some of the things that I
really wished could have gone faster... But I wasn't willing to pay for.
Hey I just blew up my billing and my client is on national TV in 3 hours can
I move the slider so that I don't hit a quota limit in 4 hours. Or, Hey my
index seems stuck can you Vacuum it for me. Or Hey Apps For domains is
sending all of my traffic to an app other than the one I deployed even
though it worked two days ago and they claim it's your problem not theirs.

If you don't have an app then you don't really have "Support" issues. You
have "Dev issues". I don't think even with Nick and Greg and Ikai being
great guys that they are going to write your code for you.

Not being in the $500 a month program I don't know if you can call them up
and say "Hey guys explain to me the risk reward of moving to Web App2 if I'm
currently on WebApp 1 and don't need the "Extras" should I move because I
might want them someday, or should I stay because WebApp is so well tested
and App2 is kind of new and I don't trust you. But I'm very sure you
can't call them up and say "I have this query it takes 55 seconds to execute
and costs me $3 every time I do so can you re-write it for me so that it
doesn't cost so much"

That isn't to say that $500 is not an amazing deal to be able to call
somebody... Just realize that the support number I have for just about
everywhere really does the same thing that the email support does, but I get
to look my client in the eye and say. I was on the phone with Tier 2 support
they say things will suck less in 6 hours. Had I waited patiently via email
I would also have them suck less in 6 hours. Where you will make up the
$500 is for things like that "my client is going on national TV" so that you
know that if you need resources or changes there is someone to make sure
they are available and go smoothly.

Brandon Wirtz
BlackWaterOps: President / Lead Mercenary

Work: 510-992-6548
Toll Free: 866-400-4536
IM: dra...@gmail.com (Google Talk)
Skype: drakegreene
BlackWater Ops

-----Original Message-----
From: google-a...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of philburk
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 5:12 PM
To: Google App Engine
Subject: [google-appengine] Re: Who wants to be in a group (organization) to
open a GAE Premier account?

Hello Greg,

Thanks,
Phil Burk

--

[Phil Burk]

On Nov 23, 5:33 pm, "Brandon Wirtz" <drak...@digerat.com> wrote:
> I think you are looking at support the wrong way.  Google/Greg can correct
> me if I'm wrong... but The $500 a month is to get support for GAE "ISSUES"
> not "Development Issues".

Just because I am in the development phase does not mean I can't have
"GAE ISSUES". It turned out there was a problem with some internal
setting in my account that prevented me from creating new
applications. Ikai Lan just did some behind the scenes magic a few
minutes ago and fixed the problem. This was not a development issue.
No one outside Google could have helped me. Luckily Ikai took pity on
this freeloader and solved the problem, for which I am eternally
grateful.

> If you don't have an app then you don't really have "Support" issues. You
> have "Dev issues".

I have 2 apps that I am developing. I needed to migrate to HDR by
creating a third app. But that was broken so I had a "GAE Support"
issue.

> I don't think even with Nick and Greg and Ikai being
> great guys that they are going to write your code for you.

Of course not. I would never expect that. I prefer to RTFM when I have
development questions.

Thanks Ikai for fixing that problem in my GAE account. I don't know
what you did but I am back in business.

Phil

[Brandon Wirtz]

It wasn't meant as an affront on you. Just would you have paid to have that
support sooner? If you are dead in the water on a production app you are
losing cash every minute. In rapid development you may be too, but in most
cases Paid support is going to be for "OMG we're all going to die" and so
that you get the Guaranteed SLA. I'm still of the opinion that as it is
written the SLA doesn't do much... but it could get you a partial refund
from time to time but based on the price you are likely spending $6k a year
and at the 10% refund rate on the SLA you'd need to be doing $60k a year in
GAE to recoup that.

ANY Who....

Being a Microsoft Alumni... I like the buy 4 support tickets they are good
for a year pricing model. And the MVP thanks for being a great member of the
community here are 4 more support tickets model. We used this quite
effectively to keep the communities active and to be able to look customers
square in the eye and say "if you call this number someone will answer 24/7"
even when the answer took 5 business days to arrive :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: google-a...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of philburk
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 5:54 PM
To: Google App Engine
Subject: [google-appengine] Re: Who wants to be in a group (organization) to
open a GAE Premier account?

Phil

--

[Andrius A]

Thank you Greg for your answers, I understand that there is no support for non-premier but paying customers available directly from Google. I think this should be said in your public site, because my customers whom I sell appengine apps never understand that. they allways ask me where the email, phone to contact google.

As you asked previously how we could improve and what should we do. I think first we need to try find out how many unhappy developers we have and what are the main problems and when look how you could support that.

For that reason I have created a form and ask everyone who has issues with GAE or is unhappy with the service fill in here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AriN30xUwSy5dC1DMmpPSU1WZnk0d1FMa3JmNXIwaGc

Regards,

Andrius

[Andrius A]

Sorry, this is the correct link to the form!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dC1DMmpPSU1WZnk0d1FMa3JmNXIwaGc6MQ#gid=0