And yet another Google service goes to the Google Graveyard.
The only practical advice you can follow now is "if it's a Google product and it's not Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail or Docs, don't bet on it being around in the long term"
The only practical advice you can follow now is "if it's a Google product and it's not Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail or Docs, don't bet on it being around in the long term"
if you add an entry to the graveyard every time a company changes their pricing structure, you're going to have a very big graveyard.
> Pixel Pass All in One Subscription Program
> Pixel Pass combines your phone and Google-powered services all in one monthly price. Upgrade every two years. Get a new Pixel after two years and continue
While it's not a software service, I think most people consider subscription programs a "service", in the classical sense.
Gmail is used by what, 1.8 billion people? And e-mail isn't some small take-it-or-leave-it feature. Even disregarding the mail itself, e-mail is central as a form of online ID for accounts.
If Google tried to kill Gmail there would be an uproar of incredible proportions.
Realistically, their best bet for getting rid of it would be to gradually abandon it, making it slower, less reliable, taking away features, etc over the course of a decade or two. But even then, they'd likely need to wait another ~40 years for generational effects to kick in and most people to get off of it.
The big kicker that makes it impractical is that most businesses and government organizations use GMail. There's so much money and power out there that would pressure Google into fixing it immediately. If they seriously tried it would be endless, endless lawsuits about all the lost productivity, valuable company information, etc.
If Google made their intentions clear, I bet it wouldn't stay down for more than 3 days before they relented due to all that pressure.
Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore?
The problem is that with a 1B+ people dependent on the product, shutting it off wouldn't just get you lawsuits, but also visits from scary men in suits and extralegal actions.
You may very well be coerced into switching the service back on - at the end of the day, contracts are just pieces of paper.
Google photos? hahahaHAHAhaha..uhm... ill host my own thank you.
That's light years ahead of Microsoft OneDrive.
The equivalent of OneDrive in Google is Google Drive, which is just as dismal for managing photos.
At least with OneDrive/Photos, you can actually manage the underlying files of your photos as well as get the overall views as opposed to Google where the Photo storage counts against your Drive storage but you can't manage it outside of what Google Photos allows and accessing the actual files requires manually downloading them or doing a Takeout.