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You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of

You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader. And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard. "Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value. And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"

Steko 9y ago
> No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. I don't think that matters. > "Unlimited" is a scam Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity. Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well. However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    This strikes me as a utilitarian vs. deontological argument. The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage. The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
    - throwaway2048 9y ago
      There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements. It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity. Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims. Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
      - keganunderwood 9y ago
        You don't have to go to unlimited. For example, I had 25GB space. I used 10. They reduced it to 7. Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this). No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company. Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so. Edit: sane
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth. > just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".

Steko 9y ago

> No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. I don't think that matters. > "Unlimited" is a scam Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.

michaelmrose 9y ago
Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity. Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well. However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
- bllguo 9y ago
  This strikes me as a utilitarian vs. deontological argument. The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage. The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements. It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity. Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims. Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
    - keganunderwood 9y ago
      You don't have to go to unlimited. For example, I had 25GB space. I used 10. They reduced it to 7. Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this). No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company. Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so. Edit: sane
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth. > just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".