[nomad543]

It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business that can offer a better anything.

[iliketosleep]

Your comment hits the nail on the head. It's anticompetitive behaviour, and in the end consumers don't have a choice because competitors have gone out of business. If it's a valuable product or service (e.g. lifetime memories), consumers are then held to ransom. It has been going on for years, and it will continue to get worse until we rearch some kind of tipping point where people start to really care.

[chronofar]

This seems specious. Others absolutely have competing options, Apple's photos the most notable (since it's by the other Phone OS maker). None as good as Google photos imo (at least not that I've tried), but on release there was nothing as good as Google Photos either.

And now that they are charging, presumably there's space for competition to arise again no? Just as if they started charging at the outset?

[zzbzq]

It didn't work though, there's like 1 billion ways to store photos. At the end of the day DropBox started as just a wrapper around Amazon S3 buckets, it's not exactly a high barrier to entry.

[chronofar]

The storage is a small piece of the Google Photos offering. Good luck searching for a persons name or "sunsets", getting time hops, stylized suggestions and collages, or easy group sharing on a trip in solutions like DropBox or S3, especially for the average user.

That's the weirdest thing to me about this conversation. People act like storage is the main thing Google Photos does, but that's not by a long shot the most compelling piece of the offering.

[atomi]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch