I really enjoy having access to my stuff in the cloud.  Docs I can pull down anywhere, anytime, mail that isn’t tied down to a single machine, etc.

Unfortunately, there are problems with the cloud, and with handing off services to companies like Google, which most of us aren’t thinking of.

Over the past couple months I have had 4 major problems big cloud based services.  In each case, save one, it was impossible to get actual customer service from the company to resolve the issue.  Not only could I not get a person on the phone to fix my problem, there wasn’t an email, or in fact, any way whatsoever to contact the people responsible for the service.

Now I am not talking about Joe’s Web Service and Tattoo Palor.  I am talking about Google and Yahoo, and their services FeedBurner, Picasa and Flickr.  It wasn’t like I was asking the world, simply to get access to my content, account, etc. and in each case I was unsuccessful at getting any level of response.

None…zip…nadda.

So ask yourself, how will you feel when you go to fire up your big presentation at ToolCamp 2014 and you find you can’t access, then to compound the problem, you find that you cannot even get email support, much less someone on the phone.

Its widely known in technology circles that Google hates people.  They don’t want to interact with us on a personal level at all, preferring to let us talk to each other in Google Groups.  This is all fine and dandy, right up until the point that they have something wrong in their system that needs to be corrected.

The model cannot work.  We shouldn’t accept it, and we certainly shouldn’t count on it.  The cloud is powerful, but its doomed if we’re expected to fly without a customer support net.  No matter how good your system is, its going to have problems and at that point you (Mr. Google) need to actually talk to the customers you just screwed, so you can fix their problems.

Don’t hold your breath.