Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one.
The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.
> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)…
This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.
Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
Expecting them to not only exempt you from paying for your previously uploaded photos, but to also allow you to continue to upload photos for free indefinitely seems unreasonable to me. That's not what I'd expect from being grandfathered in.
We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged.
But there are plenty of other breweries! Adobe hasn't closed shop, neither has Microsoft (OneDrive), Dropbox, iDrive, pCloud, or for that matter SmugMug, Flickr etc.
It's not entitlement to say that, if it would end like this, they never should have been giving away such vast amounts of free beer in the first place.
That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.
If you have an agreement with someone to give you a free beer for life, in exchange for your personal data, they should be allowed to back up? After already extracting all value for your data?
It was not a "free beer for life", but "free beer in exchange for personal data". They stop providing the beer, you stop providing the data (new photos). Seems fairly reasonable.
Turn it the other way around... would you find it reasonable to be obliged to continue to share your data for as long as they provide you with free beer? Or can you withdraw from the agreement?
If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.
2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.
3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc.
4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential player in either sector.
Read your own links please and FYI Google Drive/Storage was far from the first to offer free storage, not by a long shot. Dropbox and Microsoft were offering of free storage years before Google even launched Drive. Free hosting in the photo sharing space predates Photos/Picasa by literally decades and even in their specific form they were never without major competitors from the likes of FB/MS/Flickr/Photobucket/IG etc.
Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.
Techcruch, arguably an entity with some experience and credibility in assessing product and service offerings, noted both "unlimited" and "free" in describing Google Photos.
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
Techcrunch never claimed what you are claiming. Yes, at launch the service was both unlimited (in storage capacity—not duration) and free. They never said that state of affairs would last forever, and it would have been unreasonable for anyone to assume that it would.
This seems like a fallacy. VC subsidies benefit consumers until they run out of money or raise prices. As long as the market remains free, there will be new entrants. The problem is regulation that keeps competitors out. In some cases Big Co. lobbies for this regulation, but often it is government that kills competition by attempting to tax said Big Co., or adds expensive compliance.
We want to build a new car. A fancy electric car. We raise money from investors, build plant, hire engineers, designers and workers, establish a supply chain and a distribution chain. How should we fairly price the product?
A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.
B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.
The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.
I can see an argument for this for Tesla, because of the capital costs. I can see an argument for this for Uber, because of the network effects. But I cannot see an argument for this for Google Photos, because the network effects are not that strong, and the capital costs are directly proportional to how many users you have. (You don't need to scale our your datacenter/cloud until you actually have users to justify doing so.)
So while I agree this can be an issue in general, I'm not seeing the argument for it here. I think it would actually be relatively easy for a competitor to get started in this space.
I think you're underestimating the cost of leaving Google Photos.
Sure, it's not too bad but I need to migrate off a new platform literally 5 years of photos (+ face tagging), explain it to all my relatives, make them install another app.
Or I can just start paying 2$ per month.
I'm not too bothered but it's a clear bait and switch.
To be fair I wasn't sure if this was coming or not given Google is not exactly a small business and could afford to spend some storage money to lock people in better in their ecosystem.
What I said was it's a fallacy re: your statement, "SV's dirty secret is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: .... to gain a dominant position in the market... then jack up the prices and fleece the customers."
Consider there is also a capital cost to rapidly accelerating change in consumer behaviour, e.g. app-based ride-hailing, which can also open up new markets.
Google's "business" model has been in question for years now, I now am extra glad that I already downloaded all my data from Google, acquired my own domain and set up a nextcloud server. If I need more space, I buy another/larger hard drive, and never need to worry about data collection, services shutting down or prices changing.
Yes I do, offline and offsite backup of important and valuable data stored on a HDD at my parents. Not the most seemless or user friendly options, but the privacy and security of my data is more important.
I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
Yeah, that's a good strategy I suppose even if you do need to cart around a HDD to update every so often. You just need to make sure your parents backup is updated periodically.
The carting around and updating is made simpler with a tool I have found and love, free file sync. One of the few tools I buy into (even though its free).
No one ever hikes the prices up significantly after running at a big loss. What usually ends up happening is that loss making companies adopt a model where their shareholders are the actual customers that the business makes money from. The goal becomes to IPO and leave index funds and pension funds holding the bag and playing hot potato with it. In a perverse way it's kind of sustainable. Hate not the player, but the game.
I've been lurking HN for years. I'm not the one insulting anyone or accusing people of being in bad faith.
>>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
>Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
No, it isn't. It's a descriptive statement. If you describe politics as "what we do together", which is the only definition that makes a discussion on Google's business practices (which is totally in the spirit of the website), then essentially everything is politics because of the effect discussing the world has on what should be done.
The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.