[wongarsu]

The obvious solution is grandfathering. Google Photos decided to grandfather old photos: only photos uploaded after June 2021 count towards your storage limit. That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Considering the market penetration of Google Photos and the lack of any compelling reason to switch, I doubt that grandfathering would have accomplished what they're trying to do here. Phone companies also eventually kick people off of grandfathered plans, or change them so substantially that they are no longer recognizable. For example, I remember the AT&T unlimited plan that came in the early days of the iPhone. It started out reasonably cheap but eventually became extremely expensive.

[tchalla]

> That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

The fact that Google didn't do it is another reason why one could call it a bait-n-switch model.