this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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While I agree that it was Google's mistake to offer this in the first place, there's a decent chance that this specific guy is the reason Google decided to end unlimited storage.
Looking around at some storage pricing, he would have been paying over $2k per month to store that much data elsewhere. Maybe less if it was cold storage or archive (which would have meant accessing it wouldn't have been as quick).
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
If your usage of an unlimited service is orders of magnitude above where the bell curve normally lies, you're an asshole. And it's a mistake to offer unlimited services because of assholes like that. It's predictable, but they are still assholes.
No, it's actually more like you bought the car because you know you're going to rack up a million miles every year. Out of the norm but not an asshole move.
If Google didn't want to lose here, they could have not had that feature.
200TB is a lot of data and a completely reasonable amount if you are doing a lot of filming. HD film takes up a lot of space, especially if it's raw.
This sort of usage is so predictable I can't imagine Google didn't consider it when pricing things out. Heck, they advertised the unlimited storage space being useful FOR preserving photos and video.
Why give a company that spent 26 billion dollars making their search engine the default everywhere because they don't want to spend the 1 million dollars it'd require to continue supporting a product they advertised. They could have ended new sign ups and just supported existing customers.
I don't think someone should have to maintain an offer in perpetuity because they offered it once (though this differs from "lifetime" offers).
Google should be fucked directly for their anticompetitiveness. Unlimited offers should probably be regulated and forced to specify some limit, since nothing is truly unlimited (eg an unlimited internet connection is actually limited to max bandwidth * time in period). Or maybe they should drop the "unlimited" bit in general.