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> There may be no good exit strategy for Google There is an easy exit strategy for Google (and Amazon), and Google has already done it for Gmail: put a reasona

> There may be no good exit strategy for Google There is an easy exit strategy for Google (and Amazon), and Google has already done it for Gmail: put a reasonable cap on how much users are allowed to use (storage for Gmail, # of queries for Alexa) and charge for anything on top of that. As server-side hardware costs decrease, wait for that "billion dollar curse" to asymptotically approach zero over the course of a few years.

JamesAdir 4y ago
Exactly. Google has slowly but steady cuts the cap on the service. They've started with Google Photos which (I guess) is the 2nd most used personal service for Android users after Gmail, and they will continue to do so by putting more and more limits on storage, so it wouldn't be directly paying for Gmail but paying in general.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  A lot of the time you don’t even notice the limits. They started counting google docs to your storage limit when previously it was uncounted. But unless you are abusing the service as a file storage, it’s still effectively unlimited. There’s probably a 1% of users who use more than the other 99% added up and quotas cut down on that.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    If you use Google Photos for backup, you'll hit the free caps pretty quickly.
    - llampx 4y ago
      Exactly. Some members of my family have run into this in 2022, after I recommended Google Photos as an automatic backup for their phone a few years ago. They don't get Gmail when storage is full, something I thought would never happen with Gmail.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Just yesterday I decided to investigate why I was near my storage limit on Google. Google Photos turned out to be a major culprit. Some photos were connected to my blog--I use Blogger--but a bunch were backups from years ago that somehow got synced from my phone. But in spite of having thousands of email messages, Gmail wasn't taking up much room at all.
  - stevage 4y ago
    Yep. I've been getting warnings for years that I'm at 92% of my capacity. Never seems to get any higher. No idea why.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You may have synced photos at some point, perhaps unknowingly. Or you may have some large media files on Drive. There are mays to search for large files although Google doesn't make it especially easy or intuitive.
- echelon 4y ago
  I remember someone on HN pointing out that Google reserves the right to delete YouTube videos without cause in the YouTube ToS. It was posited that they may eventually begin to remove unpopular or unwatched videos to save on costs.
  - djhn 4y ago
    But if they're not being watched, they don't consume bandwidth. YouTube's costs for hosting a video scale quite linearly with revenue derived from said video. Is storage really that expensive at Google scale that this would constitute a real cost saving measure after engineering overhead of implementation and PR backlash?
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Cost of storage and cost of storage with a somewhat dependable backup strategy are two very different numbers. Chances are this "delete without naming a reason" clause resolves precisely to videos that won't be missed by many can get relegated to available until taken by bitrot without Google losing face. Likely multiple stages downhill, from multiple site redundancy to single site but multiple hosts to multiple drives on a single host to single drive but still copied over if the drive reaches some scheduled EOL before of failure. Perhaps there's even a very last stage, available as long as that one drive is still powered up.
    - worldofmatthew 4y ago
      YouTube stores at least 7ish copies of every video (different resolutions) and people record higher quality footage than they used and people have moved more away from bitrate-light vlogs to bitrate-heavy gaming videos. And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos. Unless prices to host content goes down, the whole thing becomes a sort of ponzi.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        For a video that is viewed rarely enough they could store one (replicated) copy instead of seven (replicated) copies. Or turn off replication for six of those seven resolutions.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  In addition, they've started collecting data _around_ gmail. You cannot sign up without a phone number now. They can absolutely do what they want with that phone number without breaking their promise to use your email for advertising. I think the article has a point, but is overselling it as bigger than it actually is.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    > You cannot sign up without a phone number now. I've found this varies. I've had to make a few new gmail accounts lately for various reasons, and only once was forced to add a phone number.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> to asymptotically approach zero over the course of a few years Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade. IIUC, storage prices & bandwidth reduce at slower rates. "Approaching 0" and "a few years" seem a little hyperbolic.
- tomxor 4y ago
  > Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade. Probably worse, Koomey's law is an observation based on the effects of Dennard scaling (constant power density while doubling transistor count due to scaling), and this pretty much ended over a decade ago due to no longer being possible to scale transistors in a uniform way. Power improvements will continue due to other one off process improvements, and due to other factors such as architectural improvements or moving more things into hardware, but the trend is not going to be as pronounced or consistent as it was before.
  - tester756 4y ago
    Why focusing on transistors count then? Compare top CPUs from 2012 and current top CPUs I've opened cpubenchmark and compared those CPUs: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX and Intel Core i7-3970X @ 3.50GHz (I didnt know how to find something better) First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points. It's giant gap. even pretty normal (consumer) CPU like Intel Core i9-13900K has 60k~ points.
    - tomxor 4y ago
      > Why focusing on transistors count then? I did not say transistor count, I said power density due to transistor scaling. There is a difference, transistor counts have continued to increase since 10 years ago for other reasons, but it no longer comes with the implicit power density and switching speed improvements of dennard scaling underlying the original moors law projection. It also doesn't have the same road ahead of it since transistors are no longer uniformly scaling, and dies can't grow exponentially. > First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points. Why do you think that is? What are "points", how have CPUs changed since 2012? and How did 2012 CPUs change since 2002? i.e what are the qualitative differences between these periods that are made opaque by "points", and which are key in indicating improvement projections.
potro 4y ago
In case of Amazon just stop selling devices or increasing their price will reduce usage and cost. For both Amazon and Google slowly degrading quality of service will decrease the usage and cost without too much repetitional damage. They can increase advertisement on their respective services, reduce servers capacity leading to higher latencies, cut R&D leaving only maintenance teams.
moffkalast 4y ago
Aren't all of their services already just using your allotted Drive space? You get 15 gigs for free and it's shared with mail, photos, etc. At least I can clearly see my mail data digging into that number.

JamesAdir 4y ago

Exactly. Google has slowly but steady cuts the cap on the service. They've started with Google Photos which (I guess) is the 2nd most used personal service for Android users after Gmail, and they will continue to do so by putting more and more limits on storage, so it wouldn't be directly paying for Gmail but paying in general.

Gigachad 4y ago
A lot of the time you don’t even notice the limits. They started counting google docs to your storage limit when previously it was uncounted. But unless you are abusing the service as a file storage, it’s still effectively unlimited. There’s probably a 1% of users who use more than the other 99% added up and quotas cut down on that.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  If you use Google Photos for backup, you'll hit the free caps pretty quickly.
  - llampx 4y ago
    Exactly. Some members of my family have run into this in 2022, after I recommended Google Photos as an automatic backup for their phone a few years ago. They don't get Gmail when storage is full, something I thought would never happen with Gmail.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Just yesterday I decided to investigate why I was near my storage limit on Google. Google Photos turned out to be a major culprit. Some photos were connected to my blog--I use Blogger--but a bunch were backups from years ago that somehow got synced from my phone. But in spite of having thousands of email messages, Gmail wasn't taking up much room at all.
- stevage 4y ago
  Yep. I've been getting warnings for years that I'm at 92% of my capacity. Never seems to get any higher. No idea why.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You may have synced photos at some point, perhaps unknowingly. Or you may have some large media files on Drive. There are mays to search for large files although Google doesn't make it especially easy or intuitive.
echelon 4y ago
I remember someone on HN pointing out that Google reserves the right to delete YouTube videos without cause in the YouTube ToS. It was posited that they may eventually begin to remove unpopular or unwatched videos to save on costs.
- djhn 4y ago
  But if they're not being watched, they don't consume bandwidth. YouTube's costs for hosting a video scale quite linearly with revenue derived from said video. Is storage really that expensive at Google scale that this would constitute a real cost saving measure after engineering overhead of implementation and PR backlash?
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Cost of storage and cost of storage with a somewhat dependable backup strategy are two very different numbers. Chances are this "delete without naming a reason" clause resolves precisely to videos that won't be missed by many can get relegated to available until taken by bitrot without Google losing face. Likely multiple stages downhill, from multiple site redundancy to single site but multiple hosts to multiple drives on a single host to single drive but still copied over if the drive reaches some scheduled EOL before of failure. Perhaps there's even a very last stage, available as long as that one drive is still powered up.
  - worldofmatthew 4y ago
    YouTube stores at least 7ish copies of every video (different resolutions) and people record higher quality footage than they used and people have moved more away from bitrate-light vlogs to bitrate-heavy gaming videos. And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos. Unless prices to host content goes down, the whole thing becomes a sort of ponzi.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      For a video that is viewed rarely enough they could store one (replicated) copy instead of seven (replicated) copies. Or turn off replication for six of those seven resolutions.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
In addition, they've started collecting data _around_ gmail. You cannot sign up without a phone number now. They can absolutely do what they want with that phone number without breaking their promise to use your email for advertising. I think the article has a point, but is overselling it as bigger than it actually is.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  > You cannot sign up without a phone number now. I've found this varies. I've had to make a few new gmail accounts lately for various reasons, and only once was forced to add a phone number.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> to asymptotically approach zero over the course of a few years Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade. IIUC, storage prices & bandwidth reduce at slower rates. "Approaching 0" and "a few years" seem a little hyperbolic.

tomxor 4y ago
> Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade. Probably worse, Koomey's law is an observation based on the effects of Dennard scaling (constant power density while doubling transistor count due to scaling), and this pretty much ended over a decade ago due to no longer being possible to scale transistors in a uniform way. Power improvements will continue due to other one off process improvements, and due to other factors such as architectural improvements or moving more things into hardware, but the trend is not going to be as pronounced or consistent as it was before.
- tester756 4y ago
  Why focusing on transistors count then? Compare top CPUs from 2012 and current top CPUs I've opened cpubenchmark and compared those CPUs: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX and Intel Core i7-3970X @ 3.50GHz (I didnt know how to find something better) First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points. It's giant gap. even pretty normal (consumer) CPU like Intel Core i9-13900K has 60k~ points.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    > Why focusing on transistors count then? I did not say transistor count, I said power density due to transistor scaling. There is a difference, transistor counts have continued to increase since 10 years ago for other reasons, but it no longer comes with the implicit power density and switching speed improvements of dennard scaling underlying the original moors law projection. It also doesn't have the same road ahead of it since transistors are no longer uniformly scaling, and dies can't grow exponentially. > First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points. Why do you think that is? What are "points", how have CPUs changed since 2012? and How did 2012 CPUs change since 2002? i.e what are the qualitative differences between these periods that are made opaque by "points", and which are key in indicating improvement projections.

potro 4y ago

In case of Amazon just stop selling devices or increasing their price will reduce usage and cost. For both Amazon and Google slowly degrading quality of service will decrease the usage and cost without too much repetitional damage. They can increase advertisement on their respective services, reduce servers capacity leading to higher latencies, cut R&D leaving only maintenance teams.

moffkalast 4y ago

Aren't all of their services already just using your allotted Drive space? You get 15 gigs for free and it's shared with mail, photos, etc. At least I can clearly see my mail data digging into that number.