Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

college_physics

The importance of individual data points (the viability of specific products etc) is debatable. What is not debatable, and quite astonishing if you take a step back, is that the majority of tech infrastructure of the recent era, and a major part of total "value creation" as per public markets is based on a random agglomeration of business models. Some of them positively despised and progressively hemmed in by regulation, others unviable on a standalone basis etc.

Its not clear if the way the mess will resolve is reverting back to true "big tech" where we pay for tech (as opposed to big adtech or big ecommerce providing tech as a sideshow) or is some other pattern will emerge.

The astonishing amount of freebies points on the one hand on the increasingly low cost of tech, on the other hand on the enormous commercial benefit of extracting value from user behavior.

What will be the new equilibrium and will it in any sense feel "right" and sustainable? Its a trillion dollar question.

Google and Amazon could just charge subscriptions. paying for email might be a hard pill to swallow, but paying for youtube ad free, drive, docs, photos and everything else.. sounds reasonable. Amazon already has prime. just require it for alexa.

i don't know how they can add those fees now but it would have been reasonable if they just started that way instead of crossing their fingers Hoping they'd find a way to monetize in the future

I’d pay $12/year for gmail. That would give Google the revenue they need to keep everything humming along. I’ve been living with free e-mail for almost 25+ years now, but a dollar a month would be easy to rationalize for the service.

I won't, unless I'm the customer, and get to speak to a human when my email is down.

Right now I'm the product and so I have no expectation of customer service. When I'm paying 1 dollar a month I'm holding someone liable if I lose access to my account.

And, legally, I can reasonably take Gmail to court for monetary loss and f I am a paying customer. 200k people going to small claims court for whatever will completely wipe out any profit that alphabet hopes to make of Gmail.

So, yeah, it's cheaper for Gmail to provide free accounts with no liability than to get caught up in mandatory customer protection laws.

It looks like you get that for $1.99/mo. Talk to a real human: https://one.google.com/about/support

I have no experience of actually using it

You can do that right now by subscribing to their Workspace Individual plan.

I'm already paying a little more than that per year for 100GB of Drive storage. It gives me a highly durable backup that's accessible from anywhere. I would happily pay a similar amount for gmail.

The dominant business model for tech is telecom and cable subscriptions, Microsoft sales, asset purchase from Dell/HP/Apple/Cisco, and cloud services (leased capacity). Instead of subsidized newspaper, junk mail, and air tv infrastructure we get subsidized Google drive. Instead of air conditioned shopping malls we get subsidized shipping. Nothing new under the sun.

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