[andyjpb]

I guess the free lunch is finally over.

For ~15 years (since the launch of GMail) Google has differentiated itself on storage. Both in terms of products offerings and in terms of company image.

To me it signifies a change in the market. They don't feel like they currently need to compete with Apple or Microsoft on any of these fronts right now. The market is pretty stable and there are more battlefields ahead. So time to apply some levers at the points where everyone else is charging (iCloud) and get ready for the next big consumer adoption battle.

It makes sense right now but changes the playing field enough that some (old) disruption opportunities might start to open themselves up (again). I guess Google doesn't feel like those are a threat any more or right now tho'.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next. Bandwidth between handsets/eyeballs and datacenters is possibly one of the next most important costs and Google has a good story there. Lots of peering, a good network, and control of the software on both ends, so they are well positioned to make the most cost-effective use of that bandwidth.

[andromeduck]

I think it's more that cost per TB for HDD and NAND scaling started stalling a few years ago.

[fomine3]

AFAIK Google deploys massive HDDs to get massive parallel I/O. Possibly they changed storage strategy to mainly use SSD (lower capacity, higher IOPS) , so they no longer able to provide wasting capacities?

[pkaye]

I think its more that as better privacy laws come into place, its hard to make money through ads and give free stuff away so they are dialing things back for the long run.

[donalhunt]

Partly that and partly the fact people have shifted to the cloud and are willing to spend money on good services (if you can guarantee bits on disk and provide a useful UI, I'm in - Google does both better than I can).