You should not rely on services you're not paying for and don't own for your daily work. :-/
My point isn't about the nature of the data that was stored, my point was the economic reliability of the tool being used to store it. In other words, you want the provider to have some significant incentive not to screw you if your livelihood depends on it.
It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity.
But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed.
Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my data to, as every other mail/calendar service I know sucks hard in comparison to GMail and Google Calendar.
Enterprise apps accounts are pretty cheap compared to your average business expense. Not speaking as a googler, just a concerned fellow hacker. That might not perfectly insulate you from risk, but I guess (again, without any internal knowledge, I don't work on this stuff) that it cuts it by another factor of ten or more.
Because I believe P(service available to me | I'm paying for it) is higher than P(service available to me | I'm not paying for it) for most services where both are an option. I'm not going to go into all the reasons for that belief. I'm sure you're a creative person and can guess some of them. Suffice it to say that I think there is some reason to believe it. If you don't, by all means run your important business processes off of charity-ware.
It's not as clear cut as the P vs P you make it be, anyway. In many cases you're better of with Google that with some _small_ paying service your paying $20/month to use, merely because Google has more money/people/tech to spend on making the service better, avoiding to fall under, etc.
As for paying a _large_ company to their service, well, if you're like 0.001% of the profits of the service you're paying for, you're not much of a customer with influence, no matter how much you pay. And in most pay-for services you are just that, a small decimal percentage of their business.
Now you could count on your interests aligned with the other customers (so that they could not annoy you without annoying a large percentage of their users) but there lots of cases where that's not the case.
I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.
>I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.
The fallacy that those are "rationally derived probability estimates" instead of numbers pulled out of one's arse in the first place.
What gave you the impression that putting random intuition numbers on the P(paid)/P(free) boxes makes it "rationally derived"?
If you didn't do that, what's your methodology, and where are the source numbers of your empirical research one the matter?
>> Are you talking about intuition numbers, or random numbers? They are fundamentally different things.
> Not if your intuition is based on random feelings and thoughts instead of "empirical research".
Actually, "random feelings" and "random numbers" really are different things. A random feeling occurs in the context of a particular individual's possible spectrum of feelings, a small subset of all feelings. But by definition, a specific random number must spring from an infinite set of random numbers to meet the technical meaning of "random".
Whether or not you actually will sue, if you paid for services you have the power to sue (on the contract for services). And Google knows that. That gives you leverage that puts you in a much better position to get someone at Google to pay attention to your account.
If you didn't pay for services, you can't sue. You didn't give any consideration, so there's no contract you can enforce against them. (That's for common law jurisdictions; don't know about elsewhere). They can more or less do what they like. And Google knows that, too.
