[zomglings]

Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers.

I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor.

Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

Additional data could be considered more of a liability than an asset, as it's more data to protect and store and more data that could potentially be exposed in a breach. Likewise, it may be good to lose users who aren't paying but are storing tons of data with us -- which as we've already established can be thought of as a liability. It's good to have a free tier to show the customer the value we can deliver, but if the customer doesn't get enough value from us to pay the (IMO very reasonable) prices for what we're offering, then maybe they would be better served with a different provider -- at least for bulk photo and video storage. This is not a bad thing, IMO.

[zomglings]

It is in cases like this where it is hard to objectively evaluate two conflicting options relative to each other that mission should break the tie:

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Anyway, I think if this decision is really a bad one for the business, someone (e.g. Dropbox) should swoop in and capitalize on it. If that doesn't happen, I would say that you were proved correct.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Dropbox's pricing is in line with Google One storage pricing, without any corresponding discount in the Google store. It's hard to picture a scenario where they are in a position to offer free unlimited photo backup. But it will be great for a subset of consumers if they do! I would be happy to see it. Amazon also offers free photo storage for prime users, although their video storage quotas are even more limited than Google's -- and, at least for me, as a light video user, those comprise the majority of my storage needs.