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Google Businesses Cloud

Google Lured Billions of Consumers To Its Digital Services by Offering Free Cloud Storage. That's Beginning To Change. (bloomberg.com) 146

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Google has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That's happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar. From a report: When people hit those caps, they realize they have little choice but to start paying, or risk losing access to emails, photos and personal documents. The cost isn't excessive for most consumers, but at the scale Google operates, this could generate billions of dollars in extra revenue each year for the company. A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People's in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google's other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.

"I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn't received any email since the day before," said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he'd finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn't an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way. "I just said 'OK, been free for a long time, now I'm paying,'" Adams said. Other Gmail users aren't so happy about the changes. "I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don't make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!," one person tweeted in September.
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Google Lured Billions of Consumers To Its Digital Services by Offering Free Cloud Storage. That's Beginning To Change. More

Google Lured Billions of Consumers To Its Digital Services by Offering Free Cloud Storage. That's Beginning To Change.

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  • You can delete some of the 200,000 old emails (Score:5, Insightful)

    by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @12:57PM (#59335562) Journal

    15GB is about 200,000 emails. You can free up storage by deleting emails that are more than three years old.

    • 3 years? Little much
      I delete my mail almost as soon as I have read it. Very rarely keep mail and if I do its only for about a month.
      Which is why I can backup my personal mail on a floppy and my work mail as well if it wasn't for the calendar.

      • I know lots of people who constantly receive PDF files that are really scanned documents that use PDF as a "container" for the scanned bitmaps. It's what many document scanners output when you press the "scan to document" button.

        I bet just one of those emails won't fit on a "floppy".

        These people need the files for work purposes and they have to keep records for a few years, it's their job.

        • They should teach their co-workers how to use a shared directory like Dropbox.

          Also, people should be taught that when they reply to say "I agree. -Steve", they don't need to include the 25MB attachment that everyone has already seen.

          • My wife will send me a picture of a phone number over MMS sometimes. its maddening but what can you do?
        • If they need this stuff for years, they need to find a better option than a cloud service.
          You can archive in Outlook. I don't about the rest.

          I highly doubt those people need that email for years. Thats what they all say.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The best feature of Gmail by far is the search engine. No need to sort can selectively archive mail any more because you can find that one message for 10 years ago with a simple query.

        Gmail massively reduced the amount of work I was going to organize mail in YAM or Thunderbird. In fact I stopped doing any organization and just learned to use a few simple search query features.

        Occasionally I need to pull out really old emails, and there isn't much reason to delete them unless your mailbox is getting full.

    • I remember back in the old days where Gmail didn't have a delete email option. You were suppose to hold onto you email forever.

      • "I remember back in the old days where Gmail didn't have a delete email option. You were suppose to hold onto you email forever."

          Awesome! So if somebody didn't like you, they could bomb your e-mail box with porn and other items, and you would be forced to hold on to them forever. Hope the wife didn't have access (or know about) your Gmail account!

        • The idea of keeping it forever is that some day you and your wife will be so old that when she sees some of your porn, instead of being embarrassed, you'll say, "oh, I remember this one. It's pretty good! Wanna watch it together?"
      • I also remember when the site wasn't slow and didn't look like shit.
        Ahh. The good old days.
        I would take a major hit to storage space to get a better designed product or options to use the old ones.
        They redesigned everything, I stopped using it except for YT so I can listen to the word fuck.

    • 15GB is about 200,000 emails.

      Not if all your clients are constantly sending you uncompressed TIFF files as attachments.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        Not if all your clients are constantly sending you uncompressed TIFF files as attachments.

        Emphasis mine. Why use gmail for running your business? I can't be the only one who sees a gmail (or yahoo, AOL, or any other bulk provider) email address on a business card and throw it in the trash? Even if you choose to use it to operate your business, it shouldn't be any trouble to throw them 5$ a month to store it. (You aren't using email as a file archive, are you?)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jhon ( 241832 )

        "Not if all your clients are constantly sending you uncompressed TIFF files as attachments."

        Well... google caps outgoing attachments at 25 MB and incoming at 50 MB (unless you pay).

        That kind of kills the idea of sending/receiving uncompressed tiffs unless they are on the smaller size.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Chromal ( 56550 )
      With so much of our lives documented in e-mail, how do you account for things you did ten or fifteen years ago? The things you bought and the prices you paid, correspondence with friends and family, records of airfare and travel? Wouldn't you feel as if you're erasing yourself if you purged that record? As time goes on, these details are more and more difficult to recall, and your own life story begins dissolves around the edges into the ephemeral in a digital world. No, you keep these records so you can da

      • One view on that saving records is "of course not! They could be subpoenaed!" That's how this strategy was explained by our former Secretary of State.

        Myself, records that I may need more than three years from now I save, or archive. Anything else more than three to five years old ... who cares how much I paid for a USB drive in 2014?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        With so much of our lives documented in e-mail, how do you account for things you did ten or fifteen years ago? ... Wouldn't you feel as if you're erasing yourself if you purged that record?

        Maybe I'm just not old enough to be sentimental yet. (Not trying to be snarky here) I've been using Yahoo for 20-ish years. Yeah, there's a lot of my life documented in there, and there would probably be a 2 minute pang of regret if it all disappeared, but that's about it. I don't need receipts for anything over a year or two old (once it's past the warranty period, why would I need it). The only correspondence I would want to keep is with my ex, the only reason I kept some of it segregated anyway was

        • About the only good thing a trove of old emails is good for is recovering from another disaster like your house burning down. Even then though, there are better solutions for that purpose.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )
            Definitely a valid point, on both fronts.

          • About the only good thing a trove of old emails is good for is recovering from another disaster like your house burning down. Even then though, there are better solutions for that purpose.

            If I can think of it in advance, I pull out important data out of emails and save them somewhere. However, I often do not realize that I need some information until quite a while after receiving the email. The capability of saving all email and then being able to figure out much later what is useful is extremely helpful in terms of allowing me to access information and being freed from the onus of deciding on the spot what I might need later in my life. Of course, having to pay for this capability forces

            • I completely get it that just saving everything is an easy solution. The problem is that strategy has issues. If you take the “metadata” approach, how much information is really lost?

              My biggest use for very old emails is finding people that were copied on a discussion years later that I never actually met, but now might be important to/for something. I need the context for that to be helpful, but not things like attachments... usually.

      • By the way, you can download all your Google data if you want to save really old stuff.
        https://takeout.google.com/ [google.com]

      • 1. I was still in highschool and those records are best being gone
        2. Order history.
        3. Nothing really worth keeping. Just emails/texts asking how I am since I don't visit often
        4. Order history? (Never travel. Not sure how airlines would handle that)
        5. No.
    • Been using it since 2005, sitting at 2.75 GB and ~20k emails. Every year or so I do purge common adverts that I get and make sure to unsubscribe from the ones you don't care about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      It's less than that if you include attachments.

      That also includes Google Docs, Drive file sharing and pictures.

      It adds up pretty quick.

      If you need more than 15GB of cloud storage, it's childish to expect someone else to pay for it.

      • Each email has 1KB of headers. A 200-word email is 1KB of content. So your typical email without attachments or embeeded images is 2KB.

        Some are much larger than 2KB because they have attachments. The average is therefore about 75KB.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          And, once again, and I'll try to use small words this time, but pay attention: The 15 GB limit includes more than just email. It also includes other things that are, on average, *much* larger.

          • You: It's less than that if you include _attachments_.
            Me: That figure actually includes attachments
            You: I'm not talking about attachments, moron!

            Hint - saying "oh, okay" would have been one way to NOT like an idiot and a jackass at the same time.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by taustin ( 171655 )

              Or you could admit you ignored the entirety of what I said, and focused on one part, took it out of context, and replied to what you wish I'd said so you could feel smart.

              But I'm not expecting you to.

    • It would be nice if you could just download all of the old e-mails as a large compressed file, so at least if you have important stuff that is archived and need access to later, you have it.

        Google and other companies should be providing this as a standard feature, but they don't ;\

    • I will rarely find myself searching for something more than three years old, usually old order confirmations or conversations I had with friends or family. I think it makes more sense to delete certain types of email more than three years old. I can probably delete all my old university stuff since I graduated in 2012. I can probably delete anything related to old jobs outside of tax info that I already save separately. I can definitely delete any kind of discount or coupon emails that are more than a week

    • I have all my mails from 2003-ish on my own IMAP server.
      I only delete Spam.

      I've sorted them into yearly folders, though, because the IMAP-server chokes a bit when it has more than 50k mails in the top-folder.

      I don't really need to look something up in the old archives very often - but it can come handy at times.

      At work, I have almost all my mails since 2007 in the top-folder. Windows is shit at searching mails.

      I receive almost no mails with attachments, so 15GB would probably last for another 20 years or so

    • Or ya know, you can just pay $2 a month to have your mail stored and backed up, and very quickly searchable. People think nothing of dropping $4 on a latte that's drunk and pissed out 2 hours later, but this is something they're going to agonize over?

  • Alternatives abound (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:14PM (#59335662)

    Google recently stopped offering any ability to automatically sync photos to your computer. I moved to Amazon's drive service and have no reason to ever switch back. Sure, Amazon is a crap company, but so is Google.

  • Never forget... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alascom ( 95042 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:17PM (#59335674)

    The defacto email account for everyone used to be Hotmail.
    Hotmail provided 5MB. Five. Five piddly freaking megs of email.

    Gmail launched with several gigs of free email storage at a time when the "industry standard" was 5MB.
    15 years later, people are upset they "only have 15GB of free email". Complaining about paying $1.99 for 100GB just so someone doesn't have to "delete old emails" seems pretty pathetic and privileged.

    • Fifteen years ago, storage was two orders of magnitude more expensive.

    • Google Drive also shares the same pool of storage. I was upgraded to 100GB by Google at one point and it was a nice gesture for a year or two or whatever it was. Then one day I get a warning from Google that my storage is going back down to 15GB and I'll lose access at some future date if I don't pay for more storage. It's pretty reasonable, a couple bucks a month, for 100GB. But I was surprised they would take storage away that they gave me in the first place.

      • These companies are like a best friend that one day decides to change on you, and become nasty and mean to you.

        Like the former friend, you just have to cut them off and find a new one,

        Sadly, we are going to come to the point where there will be no where to run, and you won't be able to switch, because the hardware is locked down and you won't even be able to use a competitor's service. Not without buying new hardware. And forget being allowed to transfer your stuff, the King won't allow it.

    • "The defacto email account for everyone used to be Hotmail.
      Hotmail provided 5MB. Five. Five piddly freaking megs of email."

      Those were very different times. Email was text only back then, and if you had to send an attachment, there wasn't much you can send over your slow dialup connection.

      If you were a heavy user, you paid for access to a 'real' mail server, and even they were generally limited in the size of attachments. A meg or two, if that. If you needed to send big files, you set up an F

    • And it would have still taken me longer to download 5MB back then as it takes me to download 15GB now.

      I wouldn't complain about paying for storage if I needed it, but Gmail does need better tools for purging large attachments without using IMAP.

  • Easy solution... (Score:3)

    by superdave80 ( 1226592 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:22PM (#59335712)

    ...he'd finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn't an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way. "I just said 'OK, been free for a long time, now I'm paying,'"

    Uh, can't you just delete/move some stuff out of your account? Why the eff do you have 15GB of email? What are friends emailing you, porn videos?

    • This is why I use a email alias as my public email address and then redirect to gmail. I realized that one day I might want to use a different email solution without needing to change my public email address.

  • the same old trick drug dealers use (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:34PM (#59335778)
    the first dime bag is free, the rest are going to cost you

    • Re:the same old trick drug dealers use (Score:5, Insightful)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:42PM (#59335820) Journal

      15 GB isn't a "dime bag" of storage when it comes to e-mails... like like a suitcase filled with bricks of the stuff.

      If you need more storage than that for your personal e-mails, you might have a hoarding problem. Get help, seriously.

      • Re:the same old trick drug dealers use (Score:4, Informative)

        by taustin ( 171655 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:17PM (#59335984) Homepage Journal

        If it were only email, this article wouldn't exist.

        But it's not. That same bucket of bits includes email, Docs, photos, and Drive file sharing.

        It's amazing how quickly it all adds up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          This story wouldn't exist if the author wasn't whining about not getting enough FREE storage space. 15GB for nothing isn't enough, they want more and don't want to pay for it.

          They don't want to delete any old email/photos/files apparently either. Google should give them more free storage because... Because Google promotes its storage products and that makes the author entitled to them for free??

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by taustin ( 171655 )

            I agree completely. If all you have there is email, you'll never worry about exceeding 15 GB. If you have other stuff there, too, like pictures (which, these days, are tens of MB each) or are using Docs, or using Drive to share large files, well, maybe you should pay for what you're using instead of whining that you can't sponge off of others for it.

            (I have just upgraded my Google account from 100 GB to 200 GB. It's $3.00/month. I guess I'm gonna starve to death over that extra $1/month.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eth1 ( 94901 )

          If it were only email, this article wouldn't exist.

          But it's not. That same bucket of bits includes email, Docs, photos, and Drive file sharing.

          It's amazing how quickly it all adds up.

          So... don't use the same account for your primary email as you do for drive/photos/other space hogging stuff? They're free, after all.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by taustin ( 171655 )

            Or pay $2.00/month for 100 GB, or $3.00/month for 200. If $3.00/month is a lot of money for you, then you aren't going to need more than 15 GB anyway because you're living in a cardboard box.

            If, on the other hand, you're just whining that you can't sponge off of Google for more than 15 GB, I have about as much sympathy for you as I do for people whose last words are "Hey, y'all, watch this!"

  • ... freemail has no obligation to provide backup or guarantee near-100% uptime.

    Paid services have implied warranties and people of standing can show loss, as opposed to freemail.

  • If Google would just allow users to sort emails by size it would be easy to delete the few largest ones (they probably have attachments that are better stored elsewhere).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sremick ( 91371 )

      You don't need Google to "allow" anything. Just use a real email client other than the crippled "email-lite" that webmail has always been since day 1.

      It's not like installing, configuring and using Thunderbird to access Gmail (or any of the many superior email providers) is hard or expensive. The whole concept that the only and proper way to access email is webmail is boneheaded.

    • Re:Sort by size (Score:5, Informative)

      by jon3k ( 691256 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:19PM (#59336008)
      Not quite as convenient as just sorting by size, but to find all files larger than 10MB, search for:

      in:all size:10000000

      Adjust as appropriate.

    • you can use size: to show things of that size and above

  • long ago admittedly - our economy teacher taught us that it was illegal for any company to sold their product under their manufacturing cost to undercut their competitors and drive them out of business, because it's a typical monopolistic behavior, and monopolies are illegal.

    I don't know... Offering 15 gigs of storage for free for years and then charging customers when there are no viable alternatives left looks eerily similar to me. Only in 2019, it seems noone cares about curbing aggressive monopolies any

    • ...our economy teacher taught us that it was illegal for any company to sold their product under their manufacturing cost to undercut their competitors and drive them out of business, because it's a typical monopolistic behavior, and monopolies are illegal.

      IANAL and think it's much more complicated than that. First off, there are very few naturally occurring actual monopolies, meaning there really is a single seller for the product. The ones which exist virtually always depend on some sort of legal protection (e.g. taxi services and cable TV can be monopolies only because some city regulation made it that way).

      Moving on, it might be difficult to show Gmail is selling below cost and I'm not sure how illegal it is, given that we allow many companies to have los

    • Offering 15 gigs of storage for free for years and then charging customers when there are no viable alternatives

      Hi, Gorak [fandom.com]!! Bet you're surprised by how fast I identified you. As it happens, I remember paying $900 for a 2GB drive in 1996, so 15GB definitely would have sounded like a lot back then, while also being realistically feasible. But by 2000 an 80GB drive was only around $300, so nobody would have been very impressed by 15GB by the turn of the century. The late 1990s were a time of amazingly-fast inc

  • I've got email that goes back 20 years, because I chose to get my own domain for email and hosting. Sure it costs money, but it gives me complete control, unlike depending on the likes of Google. They've screwed me so many times in the past that I'll never sign up for one of their ephemeral services again, "free" or not.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jhon ( 241832 )

      I have email going back to fidonet. I'm a digital pack-rat.

      This is not something to brag about -- it's my personal "shame".

    • I've got email that goes back 20 years, because I chose to get my own domain for email and hosting.

      Mine is roughly the same (goes back to 1998), because I've used POP3 since the early 90's. I also have my own domains for email and hosting (hell, it's only $12/month for a dedicated server), and download all my new email every few minutes.

    • Google used to give away free google apps and you can use your own domains with it. Anywhere from 10 users to 10,000 users for the free google apps domains. And it's still running.

  • "We will never, ever shut down or change on you!"

      I predict the next generation of jailbreaking will be so you can save your documents on your local drive and access them without the Cloud(R)(TM)(Pat Pending). But the companies don't want that because they want to be your KING, commandant, czar, fuhrer, baron, duke, captain, and your lord. And they will do everything they can to stop this.

    Let the next arms race begin!

  • Their original offer was only 5 gig of storage (Score:3)

    by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:10PM (#59335948) Journal
    Google drive came available all the way back in 2012, and only offered 5 gig of storage. That has since increased to 15 gig.

    https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/24/2971025/google-drive-official-launch-features/ [theverge.com]

    Google has just made Google Drive official. As expected, the service will offer 5GB of storage space for documents, videos, photos, PDFs and other files, and Google Docs is built-in to the service. Users will be able to upgrade to 25GB of space for $2.49 a month, 100GB for $4.99 a month, or 1TB for $49.99 a month, and upgrading to a paid account will expand your Gmail storage to 25GB.

    I do not find them to finally having a cap on expansion of free storage to be unreasonable. There are many valid arguments against Google, but it's not like they kept the limit to 5 gig for the current life time for free storage. It is more then onedrive offers for personal use, I think that is way less.

  • Delete your big attachments. (Score:5, Informative)

    by shess ( 31691 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:39PM (#59336108) Homepage

    Pop up gmail. Do a search something like this:
          has:attachment size:10mb
    Look for those cases where your mom scanned a graduation photo and sent you an uncompressed version. Delete or otherwise handle them.

    Kinda pisses me off that I can't delete the attachments only, but, whatever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WallyL ( 4154209 )

      Mod parent up. I guess I should hand in my geek card; since the olden days I haven't bothered to learn all the cool tricks for searching in the gmail inbox. The only cool trick I use these days is the html version because the most recent (or next-most recent) redesign made it suck too much.

  • Too cheap for email (Score:3)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:18PM (#59336536)
    I pay $2/month for my email. If you're too cheap to buy your own email, well, you kinda' get what you deserve.

  • Another way to reduce your space is to empty the trash / recycle bin in Google Drive. Anything deleted is kept and counts against your storage cap until you do this.

    You can delete large emails in Gmail easily, as people have outlined above. You can export your email using Google Takeout, but the format it exports as isn't easy for consumers to browse or access. You can also use software like the free edition of Mailstore Home to archive your email to your computer, at which point you can delete it from the

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