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Google: "Only affected a small number of users." This language really infers that they still don't understand why there was such a loud outcry and bad press. E
by quitit 4y ago
Google: "Only affected a small number of users."
This language really infers that they still don't understand why there was such a loud outcry and bad press. Even if it's just a small number of users, a company can't pull the rug on them without notice - for those small number of users there was no reasonable expectation that this would become a problem, and seemingly now it is no longer a problem.
Also if the number is so small: engage those users directly to find a compromise first.
- nomilk 4y agoAlso just because something affects a small proportion, it worries and unsettles a large proportion; many more than it affects directly.
- ectospheno 4y agoThey knew in advance how many would be impacted. They knew who. They just don’t care. They still don’t. And you all trust them with your data.
- stalfosknight 4y agoOne of life's unwritten laws is "you get what you pay for." I totally get why someone would want something for free but to whine about this free service not giving them what they want is some combination of entitled and ignorant.
- mrguyorama 4y agoAnyone still claiming google is free is just spreading propaganda. Each and every one of us pays with our privacy, and data, and attention.
- stalfosknight 4y agoFree is the most expensive price.
- quitit 4y agoI get the gist of your argument, but the limit was also applied to paid drive accounts - in many media reports these were the people complaining. Doing the maths it also seems clear that this would be affecting paid users primarily, since the free tier includes 15GB of storage, one would need to keep their average file size under 3kb to hit the 5M file limit.
- ramraj07 4y agoThere always was - this is what you get for using google drive. I’ve long since assumed google will do this one day or another and have depended on Dropbox for my file storage and syncing needs. Does it mean I trust dropbox completely? Absolutely not. I sure as hell trust them more than I do google though.
- ilyt 4y agoI have NAS so I just installed syncthing instance on it, after nth time commandline dropbox thing managed to break itself. The NAS instance is backed up together with rest things on NAS and overall it has been pretty much drama-less experience. The disadvantage is I can't just log on web and download files on random machine (I guess that would be possible if I re-shared the directory in something like nextcloud), but I don't really need that feature.
- ramraj07 4y agoYou’re not the target audience then. I don’t have an NAS (or even a home country leave alone a home), and live off my phones and MacBooks. Dropbox works perfectly for me.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoI think the real problem is in trusting one single thing, just like Silicon Valley Bank users found out recently. PS: I say this as someone whose cloud backups are all on Google Drive. I'll have no one to blame but myself if I lose the data. Just couldn't be bothered to upload it to a different service so far.
- bombcar 4y agoAny "SaaS" you're consuming where you suspect that you're not paying more than the cost of providing that service should be suspect and not trusted. Google Drive for backups is fine because (hopefully) losing one backup source won't kill you and you can get another quickly.
- Dah00n 4y ago
- jwestbury 4y ago> This language really infers that they still don't understand why there was such a loud outcry and bad press. Well, you infer that, but I'm not sure the language implies that. It's standard corporate speak trying to downplay impact, nothing else.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quitit 4y agoIf they understood the problem, they'd realise that there is value in addressing it head on. This is representative of Google's larger problem in the industry: users are skittish to uptake and rely on Google's new products because of their established behaviour of making arbitrary changes without consulting the market. I suspect the reason why this resonated so well is because it was too familiar with user frustration. Today it's drive, tomorrow it's something you rely upon.
- crote 4y agoThat is exactly the problem, though. If you are planet scale, you don't get away with "we did an oopsie-whoopsie". At a certain point trying to downplay impact becomes insulting, especially when this issue has been around for nearly two months and they are only backpedaling due to bad PR.
- arthur_sav 4y agoSmall number of users By google standards... probably a few million users*
- andreareina 4y agoA million? I have forgotten how to count that low! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
- varispeed 4y ago> Google: "Only affected a small number of users." This kind of thinking is so so so wrong. Imagine government saying it won't allow same sex marriage because it only affects a small number of citizens, so there is no point to bother or something in similar vein.
- paulcole 4y agoGoogle isn’t the government. A business gets to decide what service/product to offer and who to offer it to (within the laws of whatever country they’re subject to).
- remram 4y agoAnd we the customers get to be displeased with whatever service they put out, just like with governments. They might not be required by law to be equitable, but we can hold them to it.
- paulcole 4y agoYes, as consumers/citizens we can disagree with the decisions governments and businesses make and can "hold them to it" to whatever degree we're willing to go to. But the OP's point was that it's wrong for a company to make a choice based on how it'll affect a small number of people just as it's wrong for a government to make a choice based on how it'll affect a small number of people. That is (to me) a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between government and business. Government should be looking out for the least of us, but businesses aren't (and shouldn't be) held to that same standard.
- remram 4y agoWhy not? The process we use to hold them to our standard should be different, but why do you believe they shouldn't be held to that standard?
- 4y ago
- irjustin 4y agoAbsolutely true and the "small number of users" clearly are your power users. You don't mess with power users without some clear path. For better/for-worse, they tend to be rather influential.
- voisin 4y ago> You don't mess with power users without some clear path. Like last year when they abruptly decided to cancel Google Apps for your Domain legacy accounts after like 15 years? The only people using these services were power users, many of whom seem to have migrated to other services.
- bombcar 4y agoGoogle is managerially stupid; they ended up reversing that but they lost a TON of power users, and it is literally impossible to measure the number of companies that have gone with o365 or other solutions because "the IT nerd" was pissed that his free domain got fucked with. I'm one of those nerds and a minor need for a domain + email that would have been a google Apps (paid) late last year is now on proton mail instead.
- hnfong 4y agoIt's worse. They announced to cancel the free legacy tier, so I tried to upgrade but it said my account type was in the wrong country/region or whatever, and didn't let me upgrade. There were rumors a couple weeks after the original announcement that they might allow a free tier after all. I don't know what happened in the end because I just moved my email to protonmail.
- avianlyric 4y agoIn fairness there’s a follow up tweet that sort of acknowledges their comms around this were piss poor. https://twitter.com/googledrive/status/1643049396207009792?s=20 https://twitter.com/googledrive/status/1643049396207009792?s... Still not an actual apology, or acknowledgment they messed up, but at least an indication someone in the Google Drive team understands how badly they messed this up.
- DonHopkins 4y ago>If we need to make changes, we will communicate them to users in advance. Doesn't sound very sincere to me. It's certainly a change that they will communicate changes to users in advance. Does anyone really expect them to suddenly start now, as if that's a company wide policy they just implemented across the board, for the first time in history, in response to this incident, because nobody at Google ever thought of doing that before?
- miohtama 4y agoLooks like they still have to some lack of understanding what a customer service means https://mobile.twitter.com/googledrive/status/1643104062689230849 https://mobile.twitter.com/googledrive/status/16431040626892... “Instead of caring about your proposal, how about you submit this form we do not read instead”
- izacus 4y agoAnd yet somehow I see this argumentation constantly done everywhere, including this very site. "Only 10% of users...", "Only 5% of Tesla owners...", "Only 3% of Americans...", "Just a few % of blind people..." Somehow this is a mistake everyone constantly and repeatably does to make things crappier. And that includes rockstar engineers, normal engineers, managers, product people, everyone.
- jerf 4y agoI would submit the root cause of this is not what you might expect. I would say it's a failure to understand that "everything is correlated": https://gwern.net/everything https://gwern.net/everything What I mean in this case is that if you say to yourself, "hey, only 4% of my users are using more than 50 gigabytes, and I can afford to lose them", it is very likely you are using a model where those 4% of your users are essentially uniformly randomly chosen from your user base. You can see usage, and you may not be able to see much else, so you assume that usage is uncorrelated to any of the other aspects of these users that you may care about. In reality, everything is correlated to everything, and what that means in this case is that your 4% of users are not being randomly chosen from your user base. This doesn't mean that every way this sample deviates from random is bad for you; you certainly can just get lucky. For instance, that 4% of users probably includes a huge proportion of your users using it for piracy or similar activities. Cool. You may even be using this as a motivation for the action since you can see this to some extent based on reports and analytics, certainly. Unfortunately, that 4% probably also includes a disproportionate number of your True Fans, who love Google partially because of this free drive space, and because of that love, drove their work environments to Google Teams and other paid services, thus netting Google profit far beyond the costs of this particular Drive account, but indirectly and where accounting can't see it. True Fans who will perceive this not as a business transaction, but as a betrayal, and who may in their passions take actions to do things like (on the margin) remove their companies from paid Google services, and take time out of their day to create bad press. I'd say that's the core mistake being made over and over. You think you're just getting rid of your "problem children" but those problem children very frequently have correlations to something you do in fact actually want. Of course, that doesn't mean you want to be abused either. It just means a more delicate approach may be called for than just hacking off a chunk of your user base when you don't really know what it contains. It ought to be an assumption that any time you're taking an even slightly non-random slice of your user base like this that it may have hidden correlations in it you're not taking account of.
- jonnat 4y agoI guess I finally understand what they mean when they say “I don’t know how to count that low”
- sneak 4y ago> Even if it's just a small number of users, a company can't pull the rug on them without notice They can, they do, they did, and they will.