[baroffoos]

Google offered unlimited storage of private documents and people used it. I see nothing wrong with that. If this became an issue then goggle should have set limits or made it count to your google account storage. There is no point offering "Unlimited storage" and then stop people from using it.

[sdenton4]

I went to a restaurant that offered free refills last week. I brought a 50 gallon barrel with me, and then took home a whole barrel of soda...

(Or, in other words, somehow all sense of fair play and decorum go out the window once we're anonymous on the internet. And this is why we can't have nice things.)

[TeMPOraL]

It's not like this.

Google doesn't like storing files as e-mails with base64-encoded binaries because it competes with Google Drive. That solution - the Gmail Drive - existed long before Google Drive, and even had a nice tool that mounted your gmail storage as a network drive on Windows! GMail storage isn't unlimited, so I always considered it fair - they give me a couple of GB of free storage, it's up to me how I use it.

As for the unlimited offers and restaurants, people don't do that too much in meatspace because they'd get thrown out by security for obvious abuse. But they do it a little, like e.g. couples buying one cup and using it together. There are also natural limits to how much soda you can consume or use, even if you got away with taking home a whole barrel (sodas lose gas fast)...

(And note that the "decorum" and "fair play" doesn't apply in meatspace either, when it comes to e.g. retail chains making mistakes in their promotions, like that one famous case where (AFAIR) Lidl in Poland offered refunds for products you didn't like if you brought back the box, whether or not the product was still inside. You can imagine what happened next.)

However, ultimately, it's the company that's playing tricks on people with "unlimited" marketing, and they deserve the problems they get when people take it at face value (offering something with no intent to fulfill that offer is plainly dishonest). Reminds me of a mobile vendor that offered USB modem with free unlimited LTE for $notmuch, back when LTE was a somewhat new thing (~2012). A friend bought the subscription to test it out, and discovered that the "unlimited" LTE was actually throttled past 20th or 30th GB. Guess which company I never considered buying Internet services from since?

It's not because of customers that we can't have nice things. It's because of companies using dishonest marketing tactics and then acting surprised when some people call them on their bluff. It isn't so hard to say "no hard limits <small>but we throttle you past XX $unit, and there are following restrictions on use...</small>", except treating customers with respect is anathema to modern business.

[chrisan]

Whats the marketing term for "practically unlimited for normal usage patterns"? Because I think that's what they are after here in marketing.

The majority of the population will use these "unlimited" plans/products in a way that they never realize the limit. However there is always the outlier person that sees "unlimited" and is basically using the product at the max 24/7

Its much easier to say to the avg joe you have unlimited X instead of. Choose from the following 27 plans depending on how much a,b,c,x,y,z you need or even a you only pay per x of what you use! The avg person isn't going to even know those factors.

I think "Unlimited(asterisk)" marketing is here to stay for those reasons and if you are the minority power user then its up to you to read the asterisk

[noxToken]

Sometimes it seems that HN and HN-like users like to argue for the sake of arguing. Everyone knows what unlimited means in the dictionary definition and in the marketing definition. Google was doing users a solid with the quasi-unlimited storage, and people abused it. Now people here are arguing that if it's unlimited, then why does it matter what is stored there? Well it's not unlimited, we all know that it's not unlimited, and circumventing normal usage isn't going to work in the end for everyone. I can think of two examples where users didn't have to circumvent normal usage patterns but are severely limited by company policy.

The first is a lot of mobile US carriers. They have unlimited plans, but after n amount of data, your throughput is throttled. You don't even have to do something crazy like use your data plan as an ISP for you and your neighbors in your apartment. It's as plain as day when you sign up.

The other is Olive Garden's unlimited pasta offering. Some friends and I took this up as a way to kill time before a movie. We needed food, but we had two hours. Why not stuff our face til coma? Turns out that the first plate is a full portion. Every other portion thereafter is about ⅓ - ½ the size of the original (estimating), and judging by how long it took to get the 2nd and 3rd orders of pasta out, there's a soft time limit before they'll bring out your additional orders of pasta.

I understand why people want to be so skeptical about unlimited offerings, but are you really doing yourself any favors by intentionally spitting in the face of an offered service?

[TeMPOraL]

> Sometimes it seems that HN and HN-like users like to argue for the sake of arguing.

Sometimes. But sometimes, they actually disagree with the official/majority/whatever opinion, and this is this case. I disagree that the way "unlimited" is used in marketing is honest, or desirable, or should be allowed.

> Everyone knows what unlimited means in the dictionary definition and in the marketing definition.

Not everyone. That's literally the point of using this kind of language - some people will not know that marketers have their own dictionary that's different from the one normally used, and the way most of those people will use the service will not reveal the difference, so it's one of the cheapest lies the marketers can tell to pull in extra customers. It's a lie nonetheless.

> The first is a lot of mobile US carriers. They have unlimited plans, but after n amount of data, your throughput is throttled. You don't even have to do something crazy like use your data plan as an ISP for you and your neighbors in your apartment. It's as plain as day when you sign up.

It is, or it isn't. Where I came from, there are plans that offer you e.g. X GB of Internet, and then you're throttled. It's plain as day, says right so on the offer. Then there are other plans, that say "Unlimited", where what they really mean is ~5X GB of Internet and then you're throttled. It's dishonest, especially because those offers are created to make them look more competitive against real ISPs who do offer actual, unlimited Internet, usually by cable.

> I understand why people want to be so skeptical about unlimited offerings, but are you really doing yourself any favors by intentionally spitting in the face of an offered service?

It's called "voting with your wallet". Doesn't really work at scale, but still, it sends some market signal.

[anoncake]

That doesn't excuse false advertising. If a company wants to offer "enough foo for 99.9% of customers", they can say that. If a company offers unlimited foo, it ought to be able to provide unlimited foo (which it can't, of course, because it doesn't have unlimited money. Their problem.)

On a related note, I'd love to work for a company that offers unlimited vacation that's located in a country with decent protection against unfair dismissal. I wonder if I could get compensated for the (infinity-365) days of vacation a year I can't take?

[dboreham]

"Unlimited" is a marketing term with a very specific meaning. It means "limited".

[Spivak]

This is such a hacker view.

"GMail offers unlimited email storage, I can encode arbitrary data in an email. Therefore GMail offers unlimited storage! Wait, they banned me? HOW DARE THEY, FALSE ADVERTISING!"

Where back in the human world its not ambiguous at all what what Google, and every other service ever, means by this and is completely correct to call it unlimited.

[aepiepaey]

"Limited, but we won't tell you the limit."

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, and "tasty" is a specific marketing term meaning "poisonous", which I won't explain to you when I offer you a tasty sandwich.

Marketing does not create reality, no matter how much marketers may think otherwise. Words have meanings, you can't unilaterally attach some new one to a word and expect people to agree with it.

[criddell]

Marketing doesn't create reality, but the courts do and sometimes what a word means in a legal context is different than in conversation. It usually hinges on some standard of being reasonable.

[TeMPOraL]

Sure, and marketing which expects people to use their standard of "being reasonable", while the service being offered under a different standard of "being reasonable", is essentially bait and switch. That only a small subset of customers notice it doesn't make it more OK, it only shows the company is not dumb.

[air7]

That's in interesting point. It's not so much that the sense of fair play is lost, but that it changes. Somehow, we lose track of the human factor when we don't see it and focus solely on "logic" or our own self interests.

In this example "unlimited", which actually means "unlimited within reason" works perfectly well (even though it isn't well-defined) in a human setting. We naturally and instinctively understand that people don't mean "take as many as you want" or "make yourself at home" literally.

But on the internet, if it's a data/storage plan, we might get angry at anything less than infinity, because logically > "There is no point offering Unlimited storage and then stop people from using it."

I see this also apply to our "moral ease-of-use" for adblockers/paywall bypassers/torrents etc.

[mft_]

The phrase "this is why we can't have nice things" applies.

Life shouldn’t be about trying to take advantage of people or things to the maximum possible amount.

[SkyBelow]

It is like a box of donuts at the office. They are free. You can take one. Come back for a second if any are left. But walk off with the whole box and you will be judged for it. Do so repeatedly and it will become a problem enough for disciplinary actions to be considered.

Edit: If I were to try to formalize the rules, I would say that the donuts are free for everybody in the office but not for anybody in the office.

If you are acting as a group with everybody in the office, which means behaving according to certain social rules involving fairness and sharing, then you count as an everybody and can have a donut. Once you cease to do so you no longer count as an everybody and cannot have a donut.

If you have special rights to the donuts, taking them won't get you judged. For example, the person who brings in the donuts can take the remainder home at the end of the day or may choose to give the rest to someone to take home, and there won't be any judgment. Further exceptions can exist on an office by office basis.

Tying this back to Google, I think there is one notable difference. Google is a private company, not a person, and is engaging in an extremely formal relationship by way of EULA/ToS/Privacy Policy/etc. Companies abusing loopholes in contracts are far more tolerated by people abusing loopholes in our shared social contract.

That is likely why my reaction at someone exploiting unlimited Google docs storage is far more 'meh' than someone violating social norms in the office.

[trickstra]

Tragedy of the commons