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by TremendousJudge·2y ago·view on hn ↗
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.
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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?

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.