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Comment by rcoveson | Hacker News Reader

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process.

These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.

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In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired.

All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.

You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.

Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it.

When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.

Stay on track: Cloud storage. Not a buffet. Cloud storage.

Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!

People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.

They did have such a plan. In fact, to get unlimited storage, an individual had to buy 3 (And I think later, 5) seats. And it was indeed not limited, at least as far as I could tell.

Until these got abused, my guess by pirate crowd to store huge media collections (eg search “plex gdrive”), and the plan went away. Did google promise they would keep this plan up forever?

Unlimited does not mean infinite and does not mean forever. It means you are getting access/capacity as you need, without “needing to worry about details” /presuming reasonable usage/. They were not fired as a customer. No limits were imposed. Until google decided to end it for everyone, likely specifically due to customers as above.

What if someone stored 200PB on their “unlimited” account? Would you expect google to give a 5 year warning to make sure someone had enough time to download their data to their laptop?

I believe the object of discussion was google who /did/ have a Chuck-A-Rama like offering.

Specific common sense amount is an unreasonable demand. How long should a customer be allowed to stay in a buffet? Is it an hour? 1:30? 3 hours? I don’t know. Maybe? Depends.

Is it reasonable to come in, pay once, and stay for a month in the restaurant (if it was a 24/7 establishment)? Probably not.

My point is that it is easy to tell in the restaurant, and it is not easy to tell in a cloud storage context. We're not disagreeing about the former.

I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.

But that’s precisely what drives the reasonableness decision. If you are paying for the product directly, do as you like. If you are paying for “unlimited”, expect an eventual harsh wake up call if your usage costs above and beyond what you are paying.

> The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat.

I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike journalists, infra engineers don't have the luxury to pretend storage space is free or infinite.

When you win too much at a casino, or eat too much at a buffet, or stay too long at a McDonald's, or stay too long at the gas pump, they will all ask you to leave. There are common-sense limits to most services. Free-service tiers on internet services are not exempt. Extreme usage threatens the business model.

> Extreme usage threatens the business model.

Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.

It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.

Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.

But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.

Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.

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