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What is it with Google pulling off the bait and switch on so many products at once? Unlimited high quality photos for Pixel owners, free workspace for personal/

by d3nj4l 5y ago

What is it with Google pulling off the bait and switch on so many products at once? Unlimited high quality photos for Pixel owners, free workspace for personal/family users and unlimited drive storage for education are all going paid over the span of ~a year. It's almost like Google's exploding from within.

chaostheory 5y ago
This isn't the first time, nor the last. They've been doing this for years as part of their kill old products and replace them with similar new one products culture. Google Music comes to mind.
syspec 5y ago
They probably started looking at their GCP bill
- tux3 5y ago
  If that's the case, and not a deliberate aggressive strategy to acquire users ("bait and switch"), Colab users playing with GPT on free TPUs and GPUs should be by far the most worried. The cost of storage at Google's scale is low. GPUs/TPUs are another thing entirely.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - echelon 5y ago
    The community of https://fakeyou.com https://fakeyou.com users has been using Colab to train TTS models. Changes late last year to available free instance types forced most of our users to have to pay for the pro plan.
  - morbia 5y ago
    Storage is cheap, but egress/ingress in and out of gcp is not. I suspect the real reason Google are doing this is a mixture of the two, to reduce network costs and because they've got enough users now.
altarius 5y ago
My guess is where it's been going for a while, in line with the signals sent by hiring their new CFO - juicing shareholder value by cost-cutting now that the easy gains have been had and "natural growth" is slowing.
- adventured 5y ago
  Their gains are extraordinarily easy still. 2020: $41b operating income. 2021: $78b operating income (+$37b in one year). 2018: $31b operating income. 2019: $36b operating income. So they just added an entire 2018 or 2019 size profit to their outcome in the past year. That didn't come from squeezing pennies on little storage products and the like. That's from one of the world's largest snowballs continuing to roll down hill, piling up tens of billions in trivially easy profit addition as they go. When it comes to expanding margins, for an organization the size of Google that is still expanding relatively quickly in sales, it's far more important to hold down cost expansion as the profit soars (don't add those entirely unnecessary 20,000 heads) than it is to cut rounding error costs. Microsoft has similarly been masterful about doing that lately (unlike during the Ballmer era).
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Question is: is this extra income here to stay in 2022?
    - antoniuschan99 5y ago
      Most likely. Search continues to be strong and nothing has come close to bypass the moat. Facebook on the other hand, their moat has been broken through and they're knocking at the door of the castle :P Their deal with Apple ensures their staying power. They own the other half of the Mobile ecosystem so even when lockdowns end and travel opens up there may be even more usage.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Where did that growth come from? Is there a breakdown somewhere?
krnlpnc 5y ago
It's hard to tell if it's constantly shifting priorities and budgets causing projects to be retired, or a strategy to bring users into their walled garden and then upcharge once they are onboard.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
- eru 5y ago
  Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Criticism
IncRnd 5y ago
It is incredibly doubtful they ever really intended to give away boundless amounts of storage forever. It is far more probable that they were trying to entice customers.
- thrashh 5y ago
  Which makes sense. But when other companies do it, they tell you that it’s not forever. I suspect other companies want you to still be a customer in 5 years.
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  When you close a line that already has a queue, you stop new people from joining you don’t screw over those already there. End storage for new users, don’t just go telling scientists you’re going to delete their stuff.
Seanambers 5y ago
This is most probably the effects MBA's / late stage growth cycle. Google had all this potential profit lying around, and then someone came around and wanted to get a bonus out of it. Google should watch out, if people no longer get any perceived utility from their services, they will find themselves destitute. A true ad company with a search engine and no innovation as Peter Thiel describes them. I would rather pay Apple than Google.
- thatoneguy 5y ago
  ...which will mean you'll still end up indirectly paying Google: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-google-cloud-increasing/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-g...
- silisili 5y ago
  Opposite effect for me. I was getting workspaces for free to basically send and receive five emails a month or so. I pay Google for Google One storage, Stadia, and YT Music. Their reneging of workspaces is going to lead to me giving Google zero dollars per month. I'm sure I'm a rounding error to them, but perhaps others are in the same boat.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    But you missed the key point. The goal was not to get more money for Google. The goal was to get a fat bonus. Doubling an orgs profit by destroying value requires some good, high-level holistic analysis to uncover. Meanwhile the VP in question will be doing everything in their power to obfuscate that, at least until after the next comp planning cycle.
    - FranksTV 5y ago
      At which point they will fix the mess they created and ask for an even bigger bonus.
- scsilver 5y ago
  I mean this is what companies build up revenue for, to be able to set prices when inflation happens. Googles services are undeniable. Now they are in position to start justifying their high multiples.
tdeck 5y ago
I think Google is losing money on their cloud division while trying to gain market share, so they are cutting costs in every other place to make the bottom line earnings look better.
- blagie 5y ago
  ... I think I've been screwed over enough times by Google now that I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever rely on them for anything where I expect business continuity. I've done too much business with Google to ever do business with Google. I can't imagine their cloud division ever winning with Amazon and Azure exactly because there are happy GSuite/Youtube/etc. customers like me around, making sure no one ever trusts them for anything again.
  - htrp 5y ago
    100% agree... the people making cloud purchasing decisions are also usually the people who are early adopters/enthusiasts for all of these google products.
culopatin 5y ago
I think that for a long time the average non SV consumer had the mentality of “I’m not paying a monthly fee for that crap” when it came to online stuff but all the streaming services have shifted that and it’s more normal now to pay a small monthly fee for little subscriptions of everything imaginable. So, my wild guess is that Google is seeing that culture change and realizes it’s now a good time to join everyone else and finally start milking it directly. Probably not accurate but I could see that being part of the conversation.
- anticristi 5y ago
  I'm wondering if privacy regulation (GDPR, CCPA, VCDPA) slowly closes the targeted ads market. Hence, Google starts charging for services that previously were paid for from someone else's marketing budget.
belter 5y ago
Yeah, it's so unusual of them: https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  A lot of people seem to have missed the point I was trying to make. I'm not saying that it's unusual for Google to engage in anti-competitive dumping or kill their products; I'm wondering why so many of these actions were timed so close to each other. As it stands, the narrative around Google dumping is more blatantly clear than if they waited longer to phase out some other products (like storage for Universities) or simply didn't, which makes me think that internal or external pressure on Google to monetise its properties more aggressively is ramping up.

by d3nj4l 5y ago

chaostheory 5y ago

This isn't the first time, nor the last. They've been doing this for years as part of their kill old products and replace them with similar new one products culture. Google Music comes to mind.

syspec 5y ago

They probably started looking at their GCP bill

tux3 5y ago
If that's the case, and not a deliberate aggressive strategy to acquire users ("bait and switch"), Colab users playing with GPT on free TPUs and GPUs should be by far the most worried. The cost of storage at Google's scale is low. GPUs/TPUs are another thing entirely.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 5y ago
  The community of https://fakeyou.com https://fakeyou.com users has been using Colab to train TTS models. Changes late last year to available free instance types forced most of our users to have to pay for the pro plan.
- morbia 5y ago
  Storage is cheap, but egress/ingress in and out of gcp is not. I suspect the real reason Google are doing this is a mixture of the two, to reduce network costs and because they've got enough users now.

altarius 5y ago

My guess is where it's been going for a while, in line with the signals sent by hiring their new CFO - juicing shareholder value by cost-cutting now that the easy gains have been had and "natural growth" is slowing.

adventured 5y ago
Their gains are extraordinarily easy still. 2020: $41b operating income. 2021: $78b operating income (+$37b in one year). 2018: $31b operating income. 2019: $36b operating income. So they just added an entire 2018 or 2019 size profit to their outcome in the past year. That didn't come from squeezing pennies on little storage products and the like. That's from one of the world's largest snowballs continuing to roll down hill, piling up tens of billions in trivially easy profit addition as they go. When it comes to expanding margins, for an organization the size of Google that is still expanding relatively quickly in sales, it's far more important to hold down cost expansion as the profit soars (don't add those entirely unnecessary 20,000 heads) than it is to cut rounding error costs. Microsoft has similarly been masterful about doing that lately (unlike during the Ballmer era).
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Question is: is this extra income here to stay in 2022?
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Most likely. Search continues to be strong and nothing has come close to bypass the moat. Facebook on the other hand, their moat has been broken through and they're knocking at the door of the castle :P Their deal with Apple ensures their staying power. They own the other half of the Mobile ecosystem so even when lockdowns end and travel opens up there may be even more usage.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Where did that growth come from? Is there a breakdown somewhere?

krnlpnc 5y ago

It's hard to tell if it's constantly shifting priorities and budgets causing projects to be retired, or a strategy to bring users into their walled garden and then upcharge once they are onboard.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

eru 5y ago
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Criticism

IncRnd 5y ago

It is incredibly doubtful they ever really intended to give away boundless amounts of storage forever. It is far more probable that they were trying to entice customers.

thrashh 5y ago
Which makes sense. But when other companies do it, they tell you that it’s not forever. I suspect other companies want you to still be a customer in 5 years.
TheJoeMan 5y ago
When you close a line that already has a queue, you stop new people from joining you don’t screw over those already there. End storage for new users, don’t just go telling scientists you’re going to delete their stuff.

Seanambers 5y ago

This is most probably the effects MBA's / late stage growth cycle. Google had all this potential profit lying around, and then someone came around and wanted to get a bonus out of it. Google should watch out, if people no longer get any perceived utility from their services, they will find themselves destitute. A true ad company with a search engine and no innovation as Peter Thiel describes them. I would rather pay Apple than Google.

thatoneguy 5y ago
...which will mean you'll still end up indirectly paying Google: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-google-cloud-increasing/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-g...
silisili 5y ago
Opposite effect for me. I was getting workspaces for free to basically send and receive five emails a month or so. I pay Google for Google One storage, Stadia, and YT Music. Their reneging of workspaces is going to lead to me giving Google zero dollars per month. I'm sure I'm a rounding error to them, but perhaps others are in the same boat.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  But you missed the key point. The goal was not to get more money for Google. The goal was to get a fat bonus. Doubling an orgs profit by destroying value requires some good, high-level holistic analysis to uncover. Meanwhile the VP in question will be doing everything in their power to obfuscate that, at least until after the next comp planning cycle.
  - FranksTV 5y ago
    At which point they will fix the mess they created and ask for an even bigger bonus.
scsilver 5y ago
I mean this is what companies build up revenue for, to be able to set prices when inflation happens. Googles services are undeniable. Now they are in position to start justifying their high multiples.

tdeck 5y ago

I think Google is losing money on their cloud division while trying to gain market share, so they are cutting costs in every other place to make the bottom line earnings look better.

blagie 5y ago
... I think I've been screwed over enough times by Google now that I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever rely on them for anything where I expect business continuity. I've done too much business with Google to ever do business with Google. I can't imagine their cloud division ever winning with Amazon and Azure exactly because there are happy GSuite/Youtube/etc. customers like me around, making sure no one ever trusts them for anything again.
- htrp 5y ago
  100% agree... the people making cloud purchasing decisions are also usually the people who are early adopters/enthusiasts for all of these google products.

culopatin 5y ago

I think that for a long time the average non SV consumer had the mentality of “I’m not paying a monthly fee for that crap” when it came to online stuff but all the streaming services have shifted that and it’s more normal now to pay a small monthly fee for little subscriptions of everything imaginable. So, my wild guess is that Google is seeing that culture change and realizes it’s now a good time to join everyone else and finally start milking it directly. Probably not accurate but I could see that being part of the conversation.

anticristi 5y ago
I'm wondering if privacy regulation (GDPR, CCPA, VCDPA) slowly closes the targeted ads market. Hence, Google starts charging for services that previously were paid for from someone else's marketing budget.

belter 5y ago

Yeah, it's so unusual of them: https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/

d3nj4l 5y ago
A lot of people seem to have missed the point I was trying to make. I'm not saying that it's unusual for Google to engage in anti-competitive dumping or kill their products; I'm wondering why so many of these actions were timed so close to each other. As it stands, the narrative around Google dumping is more blatantly clear than if they waited longer to phase out some other products (like storage for Universities) or simply didn't, which makes me think that internal or external pressure on Google to monetise its properties more aggressively is ramping up.