How likely could GMail follow the same path ?
That would decimate google user accounts if it happened.
Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
91–100 of 256 posts
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#92> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.” Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions
To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too). And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.
> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable
That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.
Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.
Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#93First and foremost, Google is an advertising company. And this is reflected in everything they do.
The idea that Google is a technology company --- is really just another marketing facade. Their technology is only as good as it has to be to further their advertising objectives. Any product they offer is subject to the whims of their advertising needs.
All of which leads to the current state of affairs. You wouldn't expect "free" technology or data storage from a restaurant. And you shouldn't expect it from an ad company either.
Any disappointment here is really a reflection of unrealistic expectations and naive acceptance of Google's marketing hype.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#94How likely could GMail follow the same path ?
Given that Gmail does not have, and never has had, infinite free storage it seems quite hard for it to follow the same path... It's already there.
Specifically, Gmail had 1GB quota at launch. These days you have 15GB combined across Drive, Gmail and Photos for free, and paid plans if you need more space.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#95Can we talk about alternatives? I am not a Google Photos user but I struggle to find a good privacy-aware or self-hosting solution. Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS. So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonabl…
I've bought a Synology NAS which comes with a builtin Synology Moments application. It's pretty much a self-hosted Google Photos (including web gallery, sharing and mobile app which autobackups directly to your NAS). I still use Google Photos for convenience sake, but having a safe copy owned by myself on harddrives I own by myself is still worthwhile. And setup was very easy - couple of clicks on web UI to enable th…
Good idea. Just looked up the „Moments“ app in the iOS app store and consensus seems to be that it is pretty bad and slow (sub 3 star rating).
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't upvote that enough times. Funny how the truth hurts sometimes. Thanks for the link.
I like the comic and it's definitely hilarious, and but it's not necessarily an apt comparison. Imagine the same situation with a bank holding your money. Are you paying them? (I assume you're not... I guess if you are, you probably shouldn't be.) Does that mean they're not in the business of storing your money and should be able to just give it away if you don't claim it in a month?
Reading into this beyond what you were intending I'd love for private data to be as regulated as money
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The network was hardly the culprit in my explanation. How much is the cost of 4TB of georeplicated storage do you think? Surely you have to at least pay for the storage itself? So like $300-$400 at least if it's replicated 3-4x? And I haven't even hinted at offline backups and all kinds of other things.
That sounds deliberately dense. Understand what marginal cost is. A megabyte of storage used to cost $1000. Today it costs $400 / 1,000,000. To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.
Marginal cost is meaningless when you are dealing with exponential values. There are four trillion photos on Google Photos currently. That number is increasing faster than the cost of drives is going down.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#98How likely could GMail follow the same path ?
It's only going to get more difficult to switch to another email provider as time passes, you should switch now.
I would even go as far as to suggest setting up your email with your own domain. This way switching providers is as easy as just changing a few DNS settings.
I've been running that setup for a few years now and it has been flawless. Spam is almost entirely gone, with a catch-all address I can simply sign up to websites with @mydomain, makes it easy to track down if one of them ends up doing shady things with your mail!
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Unlimited”, until it is limited. Amazon already bait-and-switched on unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive storage. Microsoft, too, on OneDrive, before Amazon. Now Google. What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?
> What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round? Because Amazon has an incentive to keep me as a Prime customer (I'll buy more crap on Amazon). Most people don't pay Google a single cent. So it's not that I trust Amazon, it's that the economic model for Amazon including unlimited storage in my Prime membership makes sense. (Note: I wouldn't bet on Amazon staying unlimited for the next 50 years,…
They had an incentive to keep me as an Amazon Cloud Drive customer, too, until they decided they didn’t if I stored more than 1TB. So I canceled.
In the case of Prime I doubt a non-negligible percentage of Prime customers would cancel over losing unlimited storage, so the incentive to keep it unlimited is even smaller.
Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
#100How likely could GMail follow the same path ?
I think gmail has lower chance of this happening because google needs to feel the "pulse" on whats happening in the world by reading your email. Photos are quite repetitive and they done enough of AI training.