The incredible short-sightedness of everyone who reworked their business around subscription cloud business products that can change their terms and costs at any time.
Once schools and enterprises are locked in enough, the prices will rise, the offerings will diminish, and nobody will be able to do squat about it.
If subscription offerings were required to uphold their pricing and terms for customers as long as they maintained an account, you'd see very different calculations on what is offered when. Much more like an on-prem offering.
Aren't most large organizations bound by contracts that are set at the start of the deal? I don't think most large institutions (districts for eg) are affected by these changes in the short term.
The contracts (terms of service) with such large service providers are rarely up for negotiation, and often include terms like "we can change anything so long as we give X days of notice".
Even for a major school district, they're millions (or more) times smaller than Google, and don't have the support of their constituents (tax payers) to push back.
This is just not true, when enterprises or large organizations sign SaaS contracts. They absolutely have several years of lock-in on features and pricing.
There's a huge difference between B2C products (where terms can change at any time) and B2B products.
> Google may make commercially reasonable changes to the Services from time to time.
> Google may change the terms of this Agreement from time to time ... These changes will only take effect at the beginning of Customer’s next Order Term, at which time Customer’s continued use of the Services will constitute its acceptance of the changes.
IANAL but I would expect "commercially reasonable changes" to mean like, rearranging buttons in Gmail, or adding features to Google Calendar. Not core product changes.
Very, very few school districts are on the scale they can successfully negotiate with Google. Chicago Public Schools can probably negotiate a bespoke deal. Most everyone else has to take what's offered.
I doubt any school district has an such contract though. In fact I doubt any school district is large enough for enterprise style contracts.
I know my company has warnings about using free services - including google - for work purposes. We instead have contracts with alternate suppliers. (I can search the web with google, but that implies I'm looking for something public - I'm not allowed to upload anything company private to Drive) Sometimes the alternate is better, often worse - but always our lawyers have verified legal things that I prefer not to care about.
Even as a large company we do sometimes buy the same contract as you would as a consumer (well, assuming you actually pay to use a web site, which seems unlikely). However even then we ensure that there are strong legal language about how the terms of service can change.
It's OK to not know, but not to be confidently incorrect.
Big customers, including schools, sign multi year contracts and they pay (this is called "consideration" in a contract). Eng teams throw parties when the last old contract expires and they can turn off legacy monster system.
The subject here is Google. If (as looking back is likely) you saw this as a general statement, I apologize for the confusion. School districts don't have enough month to be worth it to google to work out a specific contract. For a school district those specific contracts are with much smaller companies. When larger companies work with schools it is more likely a standard contract - or the company works with the state on behalf of all schools.
3. Google should stop entering markets with free products, evaporating competition in the market, and then leaving it.
This is made more extreme as many of the "products they shutter because they are not profitable" were never profitable. Such that, at this point, any market they "enter" with a free product is viewed as a bad faith burning of it.
The cynical take from that is that they can burn on non-profitable choices for far longer than your average competitor. Since, as you say, they can do this for a long time.
Note that this isn't really new, either. MS used to (still does?) give ridiculously reduced/free offerings to students, only to build an entrenched mindshare that "this is the way." Nor is this just MS. Fusion 360 recently made headlines by changing their "reduced" option. I recall for years it was open speculation that Adobe used to turn a massive blind eye to piracy, as long as it was growing the demand that shops have to use their product.
Now, I think a valid criticism of me on this, is that I don't have an alternative. I don't know how to really regulate the behavior I think should be the norm here. My pipe dream would be that they have to use open standards for data exchange. If you are trying to build a new foundation, it has to be one that either pays for itself, or has an exit that is not encumbered by vendor lockin.
I hope the antitrust regulators are paying attention. When Gmail launched, the competitors' model was pay-for-storage, and Google's strategy was free storage for everyone. Now that the market is an oligopoly, Google is monetizing storage.
> Damn that google and their 17 year plan to eventually charge us for storage.
This is how monopolies are established. Corporate conglomerates able to sell a product at a loss until competition is starved out, relying on profits from other parts of the business. Once completion is gone, they exploit the monopoly.
In other words, the fact that they waited 17 years doesn't diminish the OPs point.
Or just long term investment and planning. And in those 17 years we got so much more storage and better service that it redefined free email. When gmail launched with 1GB of free storage the competitors (Yahoo, Hotmail) where providing 10-15Mbytes, seriously, it's not even funny.
Today Google gives you a lot more free storage than there were giving when Gmail was launched but it also gives you even more storage if you pay for it. Seems win-win to me and not anti-consumer. Now if they started to shrink free email storage and that affected large numbers of existing users (10% or more) maybe I'd agree this was bait&switch but otherwise this is simply giving more options.
But...once you realise you're going have to pay for something you start looking at alternative options which may just happen to be more secure, more private and not linked to your use of other products owned by google/facebook/evil corp, etc.
This suggests Google is putting 100TB as being enough for 20,000 users.
Thats an average of 5 Gigs/user.
I suspect nearly all schools and universities are within that today. Remember there will be a lot of people who barely use their Google account and just have a few text emails in it.
This will definitely hit the schools that bought into Google the hardest.
The district that I grew up in is very tech-heavy– all middle school students get a Chromebook which is then upgraded to a Windows laptop for high school. Chromebooks naturally try to drive you towards storing everything in Google Drive (student devices, if I'm remembering correctly, are configured with about 16GB of storage, maybe less). That will drive up storage use.
Most assignments are delivered and submitted electronically. This uses up storage, especially since Google removed the free-ness aspect from Google Docs and its companion services.
The real "meat" comes from things like video projects, which were a yearly at minimum occurrence. These were usually stored in Google Drive and submitted via Classroom.
To clarify, I don't think it's wrong to charge for your services, especially at a paltry $5/student/yr for an additional 15GB/user. What I do think is wrong is pushing your product with manipulative tactics (making everything free) then suddenly flipping the switch and making everything cost money once everyone's bought in.
What's wrong with the people getting the most benefit paying a little more? They aren't paying for a dozen other vendors to fill in the gaps for things they go all in for.
Just like with internet or other storage platforms, 99% of users are trivial amounts of usage. It's the 1% that use more than the 99% combined that are the problem.
I never had anyone tell me that I had to offer special dispensation to tenured professors when I was the sysadmin of shared services at a university. They get what they get!
Also I kinda feel like a university probably won't use the free tier of Google storage. I imagine they'd go for the $5/year plan that includes 20GB of additional quota per account.
"IT offers 20 GB per professor normally. We can increase yours to 40 GB on request, or more if your department can make a contribution to the running costs."
What kind of content do you actually need to store as a student on cloud that takes substantial storage? Genuine question. I used dropbox free tier with 2 GBs throughout all of undergrad + masters + phd, and I never had problems. Lecture videos are hosted online. Data dumps from experiments sure as hell don't go on random cloud storage but appropriate networked storage.
Obviously I was not using it to dump large amounts of raw data, but normal student stuff like problem sheets, paper submissions, reading material.
The people using this as their personal backup for their movie collections are the problem - they are abusing an education service for their personal use. It's why we cant have nice things.
That's a third of what a free personal Google account would get. I think emails alone would equal that for many faculty/staff, especially if you "archive" everything and only delete spam.
I agree that there will be a lot of people who minimally use the services, but email would likely be the highest space waster. Tons of people across the domain getting the same HTML-heavy newsletters, transactional emails, etc, would add up to a lot. Plain text emails are rare these days.
The average across a school is a third of the maximum of a free account. I bet the average across all gmail users is less than a third of the limit too.
Honestly this is pretty reasonable. Google Workspace for Education is a 100% free product which has always been an amazing deal for both public schools and private universities.
For something like 15 years it's been free unlimited storage for all faculty and students. Which means most of them are using it reasonably (e-mail and academic work), but I know people who would use it to store things like 10's or even 100's of TB's of video, just absolutely insane. Stuff that would cost $100's/mo. -- $1,000's/yr. -- anywhere else.
This policy isn't going to affect 99% of students or faculty. It's still tons of free storage for regular e-mails and documents. It's simply going to enforce the intended use for things like e-mails, assignments, and collaboration -- as opposed to personal movie libraries or storing 100's of hours of raw video footage without sorting through it first, just because you can.
I don't see this as a bait-and-switch at all. It's just maintaining the original intent, and removing the ability that allowed a very small number of people to abuse it as a free personal media library.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadOnce schools and enterprises are locked in enough, the prices will rise, the offerings will diminish, and nobody will be able to do squat about it.
If subscription offerings were required to uphold their pricing and terms for customers as long as they maintained an account, you'd see very different calculations on what is offered when. Much more like an on-prem offering.
Even for a major school district, they're millions (or more) times smaller than Google, and don't have the support of their constituents (tax payers) to push back.
There's a huge difference between B2C products (where terms can change at any time) and B2B products.
https://workspace.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html
And for the education offering, it's there too.
> Google may make commercially reasonable changes to the Services from time to time.
> Google may change the terms of this Agreement from time to time ... These changes will only take effect at the beginning of Customer’s next Order Term, at which time Customer’s continued use of the Services will constitute its acceptance of the changes.
https://workspace.google.com/terms/education_terms.html
I know my company has warnings about using free services - including google - for work purposes. We instead have contracts with alternate suppliers. (I can search the web with google, but that implies I'm looking for something public - I'm not allowed to upload anything company private to Drive) Sometimes the alternate is better, often worse - but always our lawyers have verified legal things that I prefer not to care about.
Even as a large company we do sometimes buy the same contract as you would as a consumer (well, assuming you actually pay to use a web site, which seems unlikely). However even then we ensure that there are strong legal language about how the terms of service can change.
Big customers, including schools, sign multi year contracts and they pay (this is called "consideration" in a contract). Eng teams throw parties when the last old contract expires and they can turn off legacy monster system.
Obviously, free stuff isn't free forever.
2. Google adjusting product terms to ensure they can continue running it
Pick one.
This is made more extreme as many of the "products they shutter because they are not profitable" were never profitable. Such that, at this point, any market they "enter" with a free product is viewed as a bad faith burning of it.
The cynical take from that is that they can burn on non-profitable choices for far longer than your average competitor. Since, as you say, they can do this for a long time.
Note that this isn't really new, either. MS used to (still does?) give ridiculously reduced/free offerings to students, only to build an entrenched mindshare that "this is the way." Nor is this just MS. Fusion 360 recently made headlines by changing their "reduced" option. I recall for years it was open speculation that Adobe used to turn a massive blind eye to piracy, as long as it was growing the demand that shops have to use their product.
Now, I think a valid criticism of me on this, is that I don't have an alternative. I don't know how to really regulate the behavior I think should be the norm here. My pipe dream would be that they have to use open standards for data exchange. If you are trying to build a new foundation, it has to be one that either pays for itself, or has an exit that is not encumbered by vendor lockin.
Some people’s defense of google rested on ‘Storage is cheap, it’s becoming cheaper, so cheap it costs more to meter it and charge for it’.
This is how monopolies are established. Corporate conglomerates able to sell a product at a loss until competition is starved out, relying on profits from other parts of the business. Once completion is gone, they exploit the monopoly.
In other words, the fact that they waited 17 years doesn't diminish the OPs point.
Today Google gives you a lot more free storage than there were giving when Gmail was launched but it also gives you even more storage if you pay for it. Seems win-win to me and not anti-consumer. Now if they started to shrink free email storage and that affected large numbers of existing users (10% or more) maybe I'd agree this was bait&switch but otherwise this is simply giving more options.
Thats an average of 5 Gigs/user.
I suspect nearly all schools and universities are within that today. Remember there will be a lot of people who barely use their Google account and just have a few text emails in it.
The district that I grew up in is very tech-heavy– all middle school students get a Chromebook which is then upgraded to a Windows laptop for high school. Chromebooks naturally try to drive you towards storing everything in Google Drive (student devices, if I'm remembering correctly, are configured with about 16GB of storage, maybe less). That will drive up storage use.
Most assignments are delivered and submitted electronically. This uses up storage, especially since Google removed the free-ness aspect from Google Docs and its companion services.
The real "meat" comes from things like video projects, which were a yearly at minimum occurrence. These were usually stored in Google Drive and submitted via Classroom.
To clarify, I don't think it's wrong to charge for your services, especially at a paltry $5/student/yr for an additional 15GB/user. What I do think is wrong is pushing your product with manipulative tactics (making everything free) then suddenly flipping the switch and making everything cost money once everyone's bought in.
You can delete old video if you want.
Also I kinda feel like a university probably won't use the free tier of Google storage. I imagine they'd go for the $5/year plan that includes 20GB of additional quota per account.
Fair point on the free tier, though it depends on how valuable they think the IT department is (see above) and yearly budget, etc.
Obviously I was not using it to dump large amounts of raw data, but normal student stuff like problem sheets, paper submissions, reading material.
The people using this as their personal backup for their movie collections are the problem - they are abusing an education service for their personal use. It's why we cant have nice things.
I agree that there will be a lot of people who minimally use the services, but email would likely be the highest space waster. Tons of people across the domain getting the same HTML-heavy newsletters, transactional emails, etc, would add up to a lot. Plain text emails are rare these days.
For something like 15 years it's been free unlimited storage for all faculty and students. Which means most of them are using it reasonably (e-mail and academic work), but I know people who would use it to store things like 10's or even 100's of TB's of video, just absolutely insane. Stuff that would cost $100's/mo. -- $1,000's/yr. -- anywhere else.
This policy isn't going to affect 99% of students or faculty. It's still tons of free storage for regular e-mails and documents. It's simply going to enforce the intended use for things like e-mails, assignments, and collaboration -- as opposed to personal movie libraries or storing 100's of hours of raw video footage without sorting through it first, just because you can.
I don't see this as a bait-and-switch at all. It's just maintaining the original intent, and removing the ability that allowed a very small number of people to abuse it as a free personal media library.