6 ms·

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their o

by lwhi 3y ago

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

jbverschoor 3y ago
Backblaze does this
tmpz22 3y ago
A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
- jdiez17 3y ago
  You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymoushn 3y ago
    He was paying though?
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Not for the last several months, not for nearly 250TB of data.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours". Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      I wonder if TOS had some clause on reasonable use. Or spelled out the timeframe they can terminate the contact.
  - rcoveson 3y ago
    The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process. These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.
    - threatofrain 3y ago
      In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired. All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.
      - TremendousJudge 3y ago
        You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.
        threatofrain 3y ago
        Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it. When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.
        rcoveson 3y ago
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    >Not for a freeloader who was in the top 0.1% of usage without paying a dime. This is a very unfair characterisation. He paid for an enterprise plan that was specifically targeted at enterprises with exceptionally high storage needs. We don't know how much storage other enterprises in that target group were using. Comparing it with typical storage requirements of consumers makes absolutely no sense. Also, it's not very interesting if he was in the top 0.1% because someone always is. That doesn't make it freeloading.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  You're right, and it's paradoxical. Companies with poor customer service should be taking hits in the stock market and in the public eye, but Comcast is still around... The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.
squidbeak 3y ago
Offering it as an option at the customer's expense seems like a fair way of avoiding burning a user.
briffle 3y ago
Google has an option to have hardware shipped to you that can hold 480TB uncompressed. Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-transfer-appliance-sneakernet-for-the-cloud-era https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...
- seized 3y ago
  The 480TB one is retired, replaced with a 300TB all flash one. But more importantly these devices are only for uploading to GCP, not exporting data from.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    The devices would of course work for sending data. What doesn't work is the google organization.
frognumber 3y ago
It may be nuts, but many companies offer this option. It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it. A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Lost & found will only hold items for so long. Imagine if lost & founds were legally obligated to keep everything, forever.
  - frognumber 3y ago
    It's not quite the same. A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff. If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc. That's very different from someone losing something on your property. I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.

by lwhi 3y ago

jbverschoor 3y ago

Backblaze does this

tmpz22 3y ago

A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.

jdiez17 3y ago
You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.
sangnoir 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymoushn 3y ago
  He was paying though?
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Not for the last several months, not for nearly 250TB of data.
- falcor84 3y ago
  I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours". Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I wonder if TOS had some clause on reasonable use. Or spelled out the timeframe they can terminate the contact.
- rcoveson 3y ago
  The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process. These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.
  - threatofrain 3y ago
    In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired. All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.
    - TremendousJudge 3y ago
      You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.
      - threatofrain 3y ago
        Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it. When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.
        rcoveson 3y ago
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  >Not for a freeloader who was in the top 0.1% of usage without paying a dime. This is a very unfair characterisation. He paid for an enterprise plan that was specifically targeted at enterprises with exceptionally high storage needs. We don't know how much storage other enterprises in that target group were using. Comparing it with typical storage requirements of consumers makes absolutely no sense. Also, it's not very interesting if he was in the top 0.1% because someone always is. That doesn't make it freeloading.
zlg_codes 3y ago
You're right, and it's paradoxical. Companies with poor customer service should be taking hits in the stock market and in the public eye, but Comcast is still around... The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.

squidbeak 3y ago

Offering it as an option at the customer's expense seems like a fair way of avoiding burning a user.

briffle 3y ago

Google has an option to have hardware shipped to you that can hold 480TB uncompressed. Not sure if it works with the 'drive' but does with google cloud storage: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-transfer-appliance-sneakernet-for-the-cloud-era https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-trans...

seized 3y ago
The 480TB one is retired, replaced with a 300TB all flash one. But more importantly these devices are only for uploading to GCP, not exporting data from.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  The devices would of course work for sending data. What doesn't work is the google organization.

frognumber 3y ago

It may be nuts, but many companies offer this option. It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it. A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.

fennecfoxy 3y ago
Lost & found will only hold items for so long. Imagine if lost & founds were legally obligated to keep everything, forever.
- frognumber 3y ago
  It's not quite the same. A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff. If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc. That's very different from someone losing something on your property. I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.