Very few people were actually using the unlimited plan (1% only had more than 35TB, and a lot more than that) and those that actually used the unlimited part were mostly abusers. Running file hosting is not an easy business
> can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers"
Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen.
In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
> Can't say I've ever seen a restaurant advertise "unlimited salt"
Neither do they advertise their lack of food poisoning. It's baked into the concept of a restaurant. Unlimited != infinite; it's a fuzzy boundary, and that is okay.
> Entering a restaurant that has salt on the table is nothing like me entering into a written agreement for unlimited salt from a salt distributor
What in Dropbox's terms of service do you think they're violating with this move?
Buying unlimited storage for common use fits into the paradigm of the not needing to be stated understanding on what unlimited means to a reasonable person. If you want to get more precise, the terms and conditions specify that Dropbox may, at its discretion, take various actions.
If I buy "unlimited salt" from a salt provider then I expect actually unlimited salt.
If I buy a meal from a restaurant and that restaurant provides complimentary salt on the table I do not expect unlimited salt.
Selling something as unlimited at a fixed price is clearly stupid unless there is a limit on the speed of the consumption (like the salt provider saying that you can have unlimited salt at a maximum rate of 1kg per hour or so). For something like dropbox it is even more stupid since every unit of product sold will increase their running costs.
Simpsons did this in a very early episode, where Homer got kicked out after eating too much.
Really though, I find that buffets are all-you-can-eat with the asterisk that you can't stay more than a certain time (usually 90-120 minutes?) and that you can't take any home.
> Simpsons did this in a very early episode, where Homer got kicked out after eating too much
I don't remember who did it but I recall a skit that went the other way. Someone went to an all you can eat restaurant and to their dismay discovered it meant all you can eat. The restaurant would not let you leave until you could no longer physically eat any more.
Not sure which example you're referring to, but all the "all you can eat" restaurants I've been to always respected their promise, as in, you literally can eat as much as you can.
I was never charged more because they decided I was full. Certain restaurants have a "no food waste" policy that will make you pay the stuff that you don't eat.
You definitely can if they're blatantly not using the product as designed. If I offer "unlimited pdf storage" and then people start encoding petabytes of videos as PDFs, that's abusing the system. Dropbox for business is for business documents, not for crypto miners
"Unlimited" anything is frequently taken as a challenge. If you were to create an anonymously writable S3 bucket and go on Reddit or something and say "hey everybody, store as much of whatever as you like," it'd take about 5 minutes for you to get a billion dollar bill and an arrest warrant. When GMail announced its gigabyte email thing, it took like two weeks for somebody to create gmailfs. And then you have the bad actors that say "unlimited" but declare fairly reasonable actors as cheaters, like Comcast.
