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>it's not a one-sided issue It's totally a one sided issue. Abuse and fraud are not specific to Amazon, they are attempted at every business and industry unde

>it's not a one-sided issue It's totally a one sided issue. Abuse and fraud are not specific to Amazon, they are attempted at every business and industry under the sun. It's just not credible to believe they initially thought the offer was long term sustainable without any limitations, protective terminations for abuse, etc. This is no more complex than what it appears. A deliberate, and effective, marketing campaign that would eventually have to come to an end. Maybe they could at least use some kind of old school caveat like "while supplies last", or "until the rate of user acquisition is strategically outweighed by the subsidies required to absorb our losses".

BoorishBears 9y ago
I think without abuse, for most users it was sustainable. If I had to guess, the average HDD size being sold on a budget PC today is closer to 250GB (I've been seeing plenty with 32GB EMMC drives). That's 4 PCs worth of content without going over the limit, and post non-technical users are probably using even less than that. They could probably account for outliers using way more, but as long as most users were "average" users backing up word docs and family pictures they'd be fine. The problem is "data horders" latched on much harder than average users. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those "average" users aren't affected by this change at all. I can't imagine my non-technical parents (for example) generating 1TB of data to back up very easily at all.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  But they aren't "abusing" the system if the system offers "unlimited" bandwidth/storage/whatever. Companies are being very dishonest because none of them actually mean "unlimited" when they say "unlimited". They should have just said 1TB from the beginning. But they were trying to fool people into signing up because they used -- disingenuously -- the word "unlimited". So screw the companies. They shouldn't say things they don't mean.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    My point is more, to the average consumer it really was "unlimited". When you can backup 4 lifetimes worth of your PC with a service, for "practical" purposes it is unlimited
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      Well what I'm saying is that companies should then offer 1TB of storage, not "unlimited" and then yank the rug out from underneath people that are actually using the "unlimited" storage they were advertised. The storage is not unlimited if any consumer can get to a point where they're using too much storage. The companies then call these people "abusive", but I personally don't think it makes it any less scummy of these companies if we can find some value of "unlimited" (like "practically unlimited") that sort of fits the story of them pulling out of their promise. It's the companies that are being abusive, not the consumer.
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        I guess we just don't agree on that. To me unlimited is impossible right off the bat if you want to take it literally (there must be some finite limit to how much free storage Amazon has). Both sides in the agreement have some definition of unlimited that is less that unlimited, and to me hosting TBs of pirated content and porn is going past what a reasonable definition of unlimited and turning into abuse. If only the minority of users with legitimate TBs of data of their own creation to back up had used it I doubt AWS would have had trouble profiting without storage limits. But with people abusing it (or using it as piracy storage or mass internet backups if you want to claim that's not abuse) I don't see why they shouldn't have put an end to the plan.

BoorishBears 9y ago

I think without abuse, for most users it was sustainable. If I had to guess, the average HDD size being sold on a budget PC today is closer to 250GB (I've been seeing plenty with 32GB EMMC drives). That's 4 PCs worth of content without going over the limit, and post non-technical users are probably using even less than that. They could probably account for outliers using way more, but as long as most users were "average" users backing up word docs and family pictures they'd be fine. The problem is "data horders" latched on much harder than average users. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those "average" users aren't affected by this change at all. I can't imagine my non-technical parents (for example) generating 1TB of data to back up very easily at all.

fapjacks 9y ago
But they aren't "abusing" the system if the system offers "unlimited" bandwidth/storage/whatever. Companies are being very dishonest because none of them actually mean "unlimited" when they say "unlimited". They should have just said 1TB from the beginning. But they were trying to fool people into signing up because they used -- disingenuously -- the word "unlimited". So screw the companies. They shouldn't say things they don't mean.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  My point is more, to the average consumer it really was "unlimited". When you can backup 4 lifetimes worth of your PC with a service, for "practical" purposes it is unlimited
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Well what I'm saying is that companies should then offer 1TB of storage, not "unlimited" and then yank the rug out from underneath people that are actually using the "unlimited" storage they were advertised. The storage is not unlimited if any consumer can get to a point where they're using too much storage. The companies then call these people "abusive", but I personally don't think it makes it any less scummy of these companies if we can find some value of "unlimited" (like "practically unlimited") that sort of fits the story of them pulling out of their promise. It's the companies that are being abusive, not the consumer.
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      I guess we just don't agree on that. To me unlimited is impossible right off the bat if you want to take it literally (there must be some finite limit to how much free storage Amazon has). Both sides in the agreement have some definition of unlimited that is less that unlimited, and to me hosting TBs of pirated content and porn is going past what a reasonable definition of unlimited and turning into abuse. If only the minority of users with legitimate TBs of data of their own creation to back up had used it I doubt AWS would have had trouble profiting without storage limits. But with people abusing it (or using it as piracy storage or mass internet backups if you want to claim that's not abuse) I don't see why they shouldn't have put an end to the plan.