Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ev…
I’m saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.
A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.
If you bought a car and one of the features sold was “free repairs for the life of the vehicle” you’d be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say “actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we’ll sell you a new one, aren’t we generous!”
While I agree that it was Google’s mistake to offer this in the first place, there’s a decent chance that this specific guy is the reason Google decided to end unlimited storage.
Looking around at some storage pricing, he would have been paying over $2k per month to store that much data elsewhere. Maybe less if it was cold storage or archive (which would have meant accessing it wouldn’t have been as quick).
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
If your usage of an unlimited service is orders of magnitude above where the bell curve normally lies, you’re an asshole. And it’s a mistake to offer unlimited services because of assholes like that. It’s predictable, but they are still assholes.
This is more like someone bursting into AT&T yelling, “YOU TOLD ME THIS PHONE HAD UNLIMITED DATA! WHY DOESN’T IT WORK!?”
…
“I HAVE TO PAY YOU EVERY MONTH FOR THE PHONE TO WORK!? WHAT A RIPOFF!! YOU SAID IT HAD UNLIMITED DATA! I’M CALLING THE COPS! WHERE’S YOUR PHONE?!”
Don’t worry about it. The police are already on the way.
I’m saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.
A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.
If you bought a car and one of the features sold was “free repairs for the life of the vehicle” you’d be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say “actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we’ll sell you a new one, aren’t we generous!”
While I agree that it was Google’s mistake to offer this in the first place, there’s a decent chance that this specific guy is the reason Google decided to end unlimited storage.
Looking around at some storage pricing, he would have been paying over $2k per month to store that much data elsewhere. Maybe less if it was cold storage or archive (which would have meant accessing it wouldn’t have been as quick).
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
If your usage of an unlimited service is orders of magnitude above where the bell curve normally lies, you’re an asshole. And it’s a mistake to offer unlimited services because of assholes like that. It’s predictable, but they are still assholes.
This is more like someone bursting into AT&T yelling, “YOU TOLD ME THIS PHONE HAD UNLIMITED DATA! WHY DOESN’T IT WORK!?”
…
“I HAVE TO PAY YOU EVERY MONTH FOR THE PHONE TO WORK!? WHAT A RIPOFF!! YOU SAID IT HAD UNLIMITED DATA! I’M CALLING THE COPS! WHERE’S YOUR PHONE?!”
Don’t worry about it. The police are already on the way.