Well to be honest, I don’t share your experience. Cloud service support has been pretty much like the service of any utility company — they’ve got their SLAs, and they’ve got an infrastructure that delivers equally to everybody. If something is broken, it’s not broken for just you — it’s broken for a group of customers sharing the same storage stamp/server rack/network segment, and they’re going to fix it. If a shitload of things is broken at once, they’ll probably prioritize, but I’ve never experienced belittling of my customers’ problems, even when running under accounts with no paid support.
Reduced to the terms of capitalist market theory, I’d say that reliability and reputation is a key selling point. In the times of social media equality, even the smallest customer can crank out a widely-heard horror story that will tangibly hurt the sales.
I’m not saying there’s no preferential treatment of customers in the cloud; there certainly is, but I’m finding it mostly revolves around discounted pricing, not the level of service. The scale of the cloud services is so huge that providing different QoS for critical situations is practically impossible. If you buy the premium level of support, you get premium support. You may get a discount if you also buy $10M/y of licenses, but that’s unlikely to affect the actual service you get when kaka hits the fan.
