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Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

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Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#131

Post by awinder »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #8
cwhiz wrote: post #2

Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.

it sucks but.. yeah, that's how it works. And that is enabled by VC funded culture, where you have million of dollars invested in companies, which can then offer services at a loss investing in something else (market share, training data, etc.). Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.

> Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.

Smaller companies also commonly get acquired, shuttered, or become big companies in their own right. There's no panacea here. I think by the third or fourth time I was migrating from "the honesty priced option" the reality settled in that "honestly priced" is usually just an uninventive advertising moniker used for overpriced underdeveloped products.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#132

Post by 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.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#133

Post by diggan »

rockengineer84 wrote: post #123
cwhiz wrote: post #2

Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.

that kind of statement is harsh. what gives you a guarantee that any other paid service is not going to do this "machine learning" on your data. has Google ever made public your data?

I think the point is if you charge upfront for storing peoples data under a certain price plan, you're less likely to change anything regarding the deal because you're in the business of storing peoples data. If you do bad, people will stop using the service, and you lose your business. You're more aligned with your users.

Compare it to Google, where they can operate under a loss for a particular service (like Google Photos) in order to increase profits in a different market (like AI recognition tools). Once they are done with whatever they wanted to do, they can close down the service without much consequence, the business lives on.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#134

Post by nomad543 »

Taek wrote: post #102

Isn't this the classic pattern followed by almost all startups? Create a product that loses money and attracts users. Sustain it with VC money until you have a large number of users who are highly dependent on the product. Then switch to profitability, knowing you can do so because you've already hit critical mass and users aren't easily able to switch away. You don't have to like it, but it is legal and it is how ma…

Owning slaves was also "legal" some point in time.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#135

Post by blantonl »

johncena33 wrote: post #87
Sebb767 wrote: post #36

I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free .

The internet is full of entitled people. I've never seen such entitled people in real life. Unfortunately lately HN is no different. I am also an avid user of Google Photos. From my perspective, they did keep their promise. They will store your photos for free before a certain timeline. Just because someone did a favor to you for some time, that doesn't mean you are entitled to their help forever.

Try running a content platform with an API.

I've never comes across so many developers who feel like they are entitled to unlimited API access for free so they can build businesses on top of your platform.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#136

Post by netcan »

part1of2 wrote: post #5

> 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

Another way of looking at this, perhaps, is that business concerns are deterministic. Deterministic is too strong a word, of course... but that's the idea.

15 years ago, the milkiness of potential cash cows was unknown. Search had an ad model that worked really well, as long as you had majority market share. Meanwhile, google had some great wed development chops. They could make a move on email, rss, a web based office suite and sweep the whole market in a short span. It was cheap enough, and each one might turn out to be a major business. Being free made sense. Higher product success rates and who cares about $10m here and there. The goal was that some of these would become multi billion dollar businesses.

I'm sure people remember the "google wipeouts" of startup territories when they released the latest something for free.

Fast forward... the bar for financial success is 25X bigger. Google's main problem is putting capital to work. We're way less naive about financial potential. Most of Google's important competitive dynamics are within oligopolies. There aren't hundreds of startups that threaten android or even youtube at any given time. A lot of the rollovers from Google pre 2010 just don't make a ton of sense.

You end up with these business/product units arbitrarily attached to stuff in the business. It's not obvious what they're for commercially, which makes them hard to manage. A commercially self sustaining unit can just operate like a business. It's easier.

It's the organisational version of technical debt.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#137

Post by JoeAltmaier »

robjan wrote: post #97
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

?

Storage is growing faster. That's my point.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#138

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mehrdadn wrote: post #39
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. You're storing 1 photo (like 3MB)?? Or like thousands/millions? Give me an estimate for how much you think 4TB of replicated storage costs if you think I overestimated?

For Google? A small fraction of what you guessed, in bulk.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#139

Post by JoeAltmaier »

chrisseaton wrote: post #67
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One data center for 1B people? Yes, per person. Folks, try to understand marginal cost. Its a tiny number per person now, and plummeting.

> Folks, try to understand marginal cost. 'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does. Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users. If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Whic…

They're not charging a dollar. That's my point. They're raising their prices, while storage costs fall.

Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#140

Post by jstummbillig »

nicoburns wrote: post #23
part1of2 wrote: post #5

> 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.

Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)?

I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.

It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.

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