Ironically enough, the last time I was "Courted" by google cloud to move some of our infra there (after it went public that we had raised a round), they were up front about how their "account management sucks" and that we'd have a better "customer experience" if we went through a reseller.
That...always sticks out to me, but, when dealing with the Google Education folks, there were some things that even resellers couldn't do, and I had to email people directly (via LinkedIn stalking) only to have my issue disappear a few days later with no reply.
Thing is parent's advice is horrible because the account manager at google simply started to ignore my billing issues. Like I could reach out to no one, the account manager realized I was going to leave and stopped responding.
So the "make sure you invest in an account manager" is not really an option at Google. AWS does this very proactively.
Unfortunately after 5 years, I can still see Google Cloud screwing over their customers like this. They seem determined to send more customers to AWS.
This is an easy way to accelerate the sale without having to do any of the leg work. The same thing happens when people use procurement vendors like SHI.
As a sales person I'm thinking sweet, I get to send a PO to SHI for example, I don't have to negotiate price, volume discounts, or go back and forth with legal departments depending on whos paper we used. You just need to approve and I get paid, probably quicker than if I used an internal deal desk.
That...always sticks out to me, but, when dealing with the Google Education folks, there were some things that even resellers couldn't do, and I had to email people directly (via LinkedIn stalking) only to have my issue disappear a few days later with no reply.