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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

> For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB.

If a company decides to stop giving customers free goods, it is not "fucking over customers." Doing something nice for a person for a time does not create any kind of moral or social obligation to keep doing that thing.

That said, I would love to see experimentation in maintenance and consistency. It turns out that type of thing is happening in Cloud at least with enterprise APIs. https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis

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IMO it is at minimum grey area when company introduces “free unlimited/little limits” while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable and then start charging people after they have moved all their archives to gDrive.

it is legal, but not good either.

> while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable

That hasn't been demonstrated. It could be that when the decision was made to offer free/unlimited storage, there were beliefs about the economics of that option -- particularly, the rate of change in durable storage pricing and performance -- that ended up not being borne out. (I am not privy to any special knowledge about this, but it is at least plausible based on how the storage business had been working for the years leading up to 2015.)

I agree in general that teaser rates -- as opposed to well documented free tiers -- are at best a gray area.

Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers.

I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor.

Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

> Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

Additional data could be considered more of a liability than an asset, as it's more data to protect and store and more data that could potentially be exposed in a breach. Likewise, it may be good to lose users who aren't paying but are storing tons of data with us -- which as we've already established can be thought of as a liability. It's good to have a free tier to show the customer the value we can deliver, but if the customer doesn't get enough value from us to pay the (IMO very reasonable) prices for what we're offering, then maybe they would be better served with a different provider -- at least for bulk photo and video storage. This is not a bad thing, IMO.

It is in cases like this where it is hard to objectively evaluate two conflicting options relative to each other that mission should break the tie:

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Anyway, I think if this decision is really a bad one for the business, someone (e.g. Dropbox) should swoop in and capitalize on it. If that doesn't happen, I would say that you were proved correct.

Dropbox's pricing is in line with Google One storage pricing, without any corresponding discount in the Google store. It's hard to picture a scenario where they are in a position to offer free unlimited photo backup. But it will be great for a subset of consumers if they do! I would be happy to see it. Amazon also offers free photo storage for prime users, although their video storage quotas are even more limited than Google's -- and, at least for me, as a light video user, those comprise the majority of my storage needs.

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