The story here is that Google used to have unlimited storage, and now they don't (for the obvious reason that it was a bad idea), and are enforcing 5TB/user limits on enterprise accounts. This was announced well in advance with plenty of warning.
If you used a service you pay month-to-month, you explicitly agreed that, just like you can cancel w/ a month's notice, the counterparty can change terms with the same 30d notice.
A reasonable amount which they did. There was nothing bad faith about this. Google did offer unlimited space, people abused the crap out of it, they changed it. This is literally just childish behavior.
Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands. When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.
> Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands.
No, you're defending straightforward lying. Why should people have to figure out there's an "implicit limit" when they see the word "unlimited" with no asterisk/qualifier?
Companies have the option to not lie about this. There is no need for them to use the word unlimited. If it's truly impossible them to offer anything as truly unlimited, then OK, in that case the word "unlimited" should not appear on anyone's advertising (at least not without an asterisk). What's the problem with that?
No, I'm defending common sense. If you're going to insist they technically said 'unlimited' they're going to insist they technically didn't say 'forever', so what indeed is the problem? There's a letter and a spirit of a contract and everyone who isn't intentionally trying to be petulant understands the difference or is going to be treated in the same way.
I think you're mixing up two different arguments. One is about whether it's unwise to believe tech companies when they say "unlimited". I would agree it's unwise to believe them, because I have insider knowledge (that this word tends to be a lie in the tech industry). The other argument is about whether companies should be allowed to tell this lie without being penalised. These are completely separate things.
Note the word "unlimited" sometimes really does mean unlimited. For example, "unlimited train travel for a month" – there really is no limit to how much you can travel on that ticket. So it's not as if this word is always false by its very nature. It can be true, and it can be false. For some reason, in the tech world, we often encounter people like you defending this particular lie, apparently on the grounds that you personally have learned to see it as a lie so everyone else should just learn this too. It's a contemptible position. And you have the gall to call people "petulant" and "childish" for asking not to be lied to.
And Oracle Cloud says the kinda beefy VM (4 cores of an ARM thing and 24 GB of RAM) on the free tier is free forever. Sounds reasonable to me. I mean, would Oracle really do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? Surely they have bigger fish to fry, and a legal department that doesn't let them do stupid things. Besides, they even give you a bunch of free data egress, like it would cost almost $1k/mo on AWS! Man, this Larry Ellison guy sure is starting to seem like someone I could have a beer with.
That is a goddamn stupid way to run a business. It's fine for personal agreements, but you need to be absolutely specific when dealing business-to-business, for your protection and theirs. Leaving things unspecified is just asking for loophole formation that leads to unexpected expense.
Though if we're going to make implicit-limit buffet comparisons, 5TB isn't even enough to mirror one hard drive. And the better comparison to what used to be unlimited is the "business standard" plan which only allows 2TB. That's a lot stricter than simply stopping "abuse" of the unlimited storage.
There was nothing saying that unlimited was forever. Usually if there is some guaranteed time period it should be documented as such in the contract. It's Google's right to change the product they are offering and it's your right to decide it's no longer the product you want to use as a result. The only thing you can ask for is ample notice so that you have to adjust to change if need be (which I guess is more of a courtesy and show of good faith).
> When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.
The name “all you can eat” suggests that you have to eat the food while you’re there, which naturally limits the amount.
It's bitten a team I work with pretty hard, who for some inexplicable reason decided to store everything on OneDrive instead of our enormous on-prem NAS. Even more fun; all of their accounts still say "XTB of unlimited", the new data caps seem to be different for every user (everyone gets cut off at different amounts), and IT can't even get a straight answer about what the new caps are.
The new default is that everything goes to OneDrive. If you have data on your hard disk in regular Documents folders, it will move it to OneDrive without asking you.
No, this was a conscious decision on their part that they would store X00GB phsyics simulation results on OneDrive instead of the on-prem system that every other department uses. They've even written it up that its considered their "standard practice".
OneDrive has been worse in just about every possible benchmark so no one is sure why they did it. Best guess is it was some HPPO decision, who may or may not still be with the company.
Both of you are correct; it may have been an intentional choice by your team (since, otherwise it would go to a private onedrive, not a shared OneDrive).
It's also true that Documents are linked to OneDrive now in corp environments.
I think there's a way to disable it, but of course there's a different setting for the Office Suite, they also default to OneDrive.
I don't think this is restricted to corp environments anymore. I did a personal Windows 11 install and it started moving all of my stuff to OneDrive, and the way it did it (move instead of copy, across drives) caused me data loss. :(
My company is going through that with Google Workspace. In most cases the teams who take that decision do so because they don’t like to have project files spread over 2 locations (code and simulations on a network drive, documents on the cloud). It doesn’t have anything to do with available storage.
Accurate, but that last sentence frames the behaviour as acceptable?
I have nothing against them for reversing a previous decision, but then they should admit the mistake and make amends — some kind of compensation? They way they've chosen to handle it makes them liars.
