Google Workspace for Education storage policy changes
support.google.com
support.google.com
For something like 15 years it's been free unlimited storage for all faculty and students. Which means most of them are using it reasonably (e-mail and academic work), but I know people who would use it to store things like 10's or even 100's of TB's of video, just absolutely insane. Stuff that would cost $100's/mo. -- $1,000's/yr. -- anywhere else.
This policy isn't going to affect 99% of students or faculty. It's still tons of free storage for regular e-mails and documents. It's simply going to enforce the intended use for things like e-mails, assignments, and collaboration -- as opposed to personal movie libraries or storing 100's of hours of raw video footage without sorting through it first, just because you can.
I don't see this as a bait-and-switch at all. It's just maintaining the original intent, and removing the ability that allowed a very small number of people to abuse it as a free personal media library.
Some people’s defense of google rested on ‘Storage is cheap, it’s becoming cheaper, so cheap it costs more to meter it and charge for it’.
This is how monopolies are established. Corporate conglomerates able to sell a product at a loss until competition is starved out, relying on profits from other parts of the business. Once completion is gone, they exploit the monopoly.
In other words, the fact that they waited 17 years doesn't diminish the OPs point.
Today Google gives you a lot more free storage than there were giving when Gmail was launched but it also gives you even more storage if you pay for it. Seems win-win to me and not anti-consumer. Now if they started to shrink free email storage and that affected large numbers of existing users (10% or more) maybe I'd agree this was bait&switch but otherwise this is simply giving more options.
Thats an average of 5 Gigs/user.
I suspect nearly all schools and universities are within that today. Remember there will be a lot of people who barely use their Google account and just have a few text emails in it.
The district that I grew up in is very tech-heavy– all middle school students get a Chromebook which is then upgraded to a Windows laptop for high school. Chromebooks naturally try to drive you towards storing everything in Google Drive (student devices, if I'm remembering correctly, are configured with about 16GB of storage, maybe less). That will drive up storage use.
Most assignments are delivered and submitted electronically. This uses up storage, especially since Google removed the free-ness aspect from Google Docs and its companion services.
The real "meat" comes from things like video projects, which were a yearly at minimum occurrence. These were usually stored in Google Drive and submitted via Classroom.
To clarify, I don't think it's wrong to charge for your services, especially at a paltry $5/student/yr for an additional 15GB/user. What I do think is wrong is pushing your product with manipulative tactics (making everything free) then suddenly flipping the switch and making everything cost money once everyone's bought in.
You can delete old video if you want.
Also I kinda feel like a university probably won't use the free tier of Google storage. I imagine they'd go for the $5/year plan that includes 20GB of additional quota per account.
Fair point on the free tier, though it depends on how valuable they think the IT department is (see above) and yearly budget, etc.
Obviously I was not using it to dump large amounts of raw data, but normal student stuff like problem sheets, paper submissions, reading material.
The people using this as their personal backup for their movie collections are the problem - they are abusing an education service for their personal use. It's why we cant have nice things.
I agree that there will be a lot of people who minimally use the services, but email would likely be the highest space waster. Tons of people across the domain getting the same HTML-heavy newsletters, transactional emails, etc, would add up to a lot. Plain text emails are rare these days.
Once schools and enterprises are locked in enough, the prices will rise, the offerings will diminish, and nobody will be able to do squat about it.
If subscription offerings were required to uphold their pricing and terms for customers as long as they maintained an account, you'd see very different calculations on what is offered when. Much more like an on-prem offering.
Even for a major school district, they're millions (or more) times smaller than Google, and don't have the support of their constituents (tax payers) to push back.
There's a huge difference between B2C products (where terms can change at any time) and B2B products.
https://workspace.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html
And for the education offering, it's there too.
> Google may make commercially reasonable changes to the Services from time to time.
> Google may change the terms of this Agreement from time to time ... These changes will only take effect at the beginning of Customer’s next Order Term, at which time Customer’s continued use of the Services will constitute its acceptance of the changes.
I know my company has warnings about using free services - including google - for work purposes. We instead have contracts with alternate suppliers. (I can search the web with google, but that implies I'm looking for something public - I'm not allowed to upload anything company private to Drive) Sometimes the alternate is better, often worse - but always our lawyers have verified legal things that I prefer not to care about.
Even as a large company we do sometimes buy the same contract as you would as a consumer (well, assuming you actually pay to use a web site, which seems unlikely). However even then we ensure that there are strong legal language about how the terms of service can change.
Big customers, including schools, sign multi year contracts and they pay (this is called "consideration" in a contract). Eng teams throw parties when the last old contract expires and they can turn off legacy monster system.
Obviously, free stuff isn't free forever.
2. Google adjusting product terms to ensure they can continue running it
Pick one.
This is made more extreme as many of the "products they shutter because they are not profitable" were never profitable. Such that, at this point, any market they "enter" with a free product is viewed as a bad faith burning of it.
The cynical take from that is that they can burn on non-profitable choices for far longer than your average competitor. Since, as you say, they can do this for a long time.
Note that this isn't really new, either. MS used to (still does?) give ridiculously reduced/free offerings to students, only to build an entrenched mindshare that "this is the way." Nor is this just MS. Fusion 360 recently made headlines by changing their "reduced" option. I recall for years it was open speculation that Adobe used to turn a massive blind eye to piracy, as long as it was growing the demand that shops have to use their product.
Now, I think a valid criticism of me on this, is that I don't have an alternative. I don't know how to really regulate the behavior I think should be the norm here. My pipe dream would be that they have to use open standards for data exchange. If you are trying to build a new foundation, it has to be one that either pays for itself, or has an exit that is not encumbered by vendor lockin.