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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

The incredible short-sightedness of everyone who reworked their business around subscription cloud business products that can change their terms and costs at any time.

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.

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1. Google shuttering products because they're not profitable

2. Google adjusting product terms to ensure they can continue running it

Pick one.

3. Google should stop entering markets with free products, evaporating competition in the market, and then leaving it.

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.

Google for Education has been running for 15 years, longer than most of its users have been alive.

I'm... not sure what the point of this is.

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.

Option 3: Google not dumping product for 'free' with unfeasible business model, that kills the competition to oligopoly.

Even worse, there's a reasonable assumption that they earn per Chromebook and that that finances the storage.

Is the problem that product is sold below cost or above cost?

Aren't most large organizations bound by contracts that are set at the start of the deal? I don't think most large institutions (districts for eg) are affected by these changes in the short term.

The contracts (terms of service) with such large service providers are rarely up for negotiation, and often include terms like "we can change anything so long as we give X days of notice".

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.

This is just not true, when enterprises or large organizations sign SaaS contracts. They absolutely have several years of lock-in on features and pricing.

There's a huge difference between B2C products (where terms can change at any time) and B2B products.

Feel free to view Google's Workspace (their B2B offering) terms of service. In particular, section 2 part 1.

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.

https://workspace.google.com/terms/education_terms.html

IANAL but I would expect "commercially reasonable changes" to mean like, rearranging buttons in Gmail, or adding features to Google Calendar. Not core product changes.

Very, very few school districts are on the scale they can successfully negotiate with Google. Chicago Public Schools can probably negotiate a bespoke deal. Most everyone else has to take what's offered.

I doubt any school district has an such contract though. In fact I doubt any school district is large enough for enterprise style contracts.

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.

It's OK to not know, but not to be confidently incorrect.

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.

The subject here is Google. If (as looking back is likely) you saw this as a general statement, I apologize for the confusion. School districts don't have enough month to be worth it to google to work out a specific contract. For a school district those specific contracts are with much smaller companies. When larger companies work with schools it is more likely a standard contract - or the company works with the state on behalf of all schools.

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