I started working for a small manufacturing company in 2014, and the previous guy at my chair was still using AutoCAD 2000i for the shop drawings. Not to mention, Windows XP. This was good enough for what it was for, but it was time for a revamp.

I requisitioned a new PC, a pair of monitors, and a perpetual license for Autodesk's design suite 2016. I was up and running.

Then, Autodesk got in touch with me repeatedly to update and upgrade to design suite 2017, 2018, and so on... none of which would have a perpetual license, but paid monthly or yearly. I was like "Nope! No need here!"

Updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and it was pretty difficult to retain the perpetual subscription. Pretty soon I wasn't able to run on my PC and my laptop, which was important as I'd started working from home more often.

Pretty cool that they don’t delete your data though, that would really suck

Plus it gets their tendrils into the every day lives of people. Call it an investment to intertwine their company with the basic functions of people’s lives in order to get them invested in the ecosystem, making it easy for them to go all-in on google services and difficult to switch to another service.

So they are grooming them, more or less, to use their software. And here I thought they offered student discounts to be nice 🫠

Please read this entire message

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

Questions about a business or a group's motivation are not allowed on ELI5. These are usually either straightforward, or known only to the organisations involved, leading to speculation (Rule 2).

If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.

Google is company for collecting information to sell for advertisors. Usually you use google account for all these utility softwares and sum of your activities, preferences and interests goes in unique customer id. That id then can be targeted with very specific ads that with high likelyhood will turn into purchase of some product.

If you like using one of these tools outside of work, you may do the following:

1. Be more likely to apply for jobs that list them as tools

2. Be more likely to advocate for the use of them at your workplace

Both of these scenarios eventually lead to a sales person getting a meeting with a decision maker

Yeah, because students become pros and spend thousands on the software they're familiar with because no one wants to relearn how to do things on new software.

A lot of people stayed on those old versions for a REALLY long time (some probably still are), but they just got too old for most so they had to cave in since it was the only real option.

Adobe isn't too bad. $60/mo for the master collection, which used to be $3k, so it is actually cheaper if you upgraded more than every 5 years.

3D/CAD software is crazy though. Some are priced as much as if you upgraded every year, or more, which nobody was doing.

You actually believe this? That someone actually goes through your google docs, reads them and steals ideas that they sell to China? When people say Google uses your data, that's not what they mean.

[removed]

its called Google Workspace

This speculation borders on misinformation. According to Google's privacy policy they have no access to content you've saved in Google drive except where required by law, or with your explicit permission.

I'm not trying to defend a big corporation; it's likely that Google is doing other questionably ethical things, but comments like this which point in patently false directions distract from the actually important transgressions.

This is entirely different from a model being trained on public GitHub code; it's not possible without Google making claims that opens themselves up to litigation. (Companies won't do this... There's no reason to make themselves financially vulnerable like that.)

Damn... I remember when they were first trying to implement the subscription thing and thought it'd never take off.. "It's such a scam! People are just gonna use the older version until yall give up this stupid idea!"

I still don't know how they did it..

Thank god for google docs

But a redditor said so, so it must be true.

It's only "terrifying" if you don't know what it actually is.

Just to piggyback on this, a lot of the stuff that might be free for an individual is something a business pays for. For instance, my company pays to use gmail and the rest of the Google web suite (e.g. Hangouts, Drive) for most of its operations. When people already understand the set of tools, it makes it more attractive to the business, I.e. letting people use it for free is good marketing.

Yeah, it's insanely cheap. I get 2 TB for 10 bucks a month.

If it’s a free service/product, the user is the currency. Data is more valuable than oil now.

I read about an example of this back in the day. I can’t recall any of the fine details so go ahead and don’t believe me, but I recall some engineer used the Google suite while developing some novel way to do something with cars and then Google shortly thereafter announced the same feature coming to android auto, then some novel idea he had about an engine or something suddenly ended up on the Chinese market. Could just be coincidence since that sort of thing happens all the time, but after I graduated high school I’ve consciously avoided the G Suite for anything other than polls for my movie watching club

E; the 2nd story is more of a cautionary tale against cloud services in general. Again who knows if either is true

Can you point the fine print? That sounds completely unbelievable.

Little pedantic imo describing the outcomes is really what people care about

Few reasons

1. While google does have free versions of this software they offer google workplace to companies who pay for more, features, and security. Allowing people to use it free makes more conversions for their paid software.

2. It forces you to use chrome. Since google docs features work best in Chrome most people keep using to to have the best google doc experience. Again taking market share from competitors.

3. A google account is a google account. All your data is centralized and keep you coming to them for all your needs. No matter if it’s email, cell phone, speaker, youtube, docs or any one of googles many free products.

4. Putting it all together : The value to google is you being there and using their products. Google makes it money on ads and anything the shows you ads is great. But anything that collects data on you to show targeted and and make targeted ad campaigns is even better. Other companies are willing to pay huge money for that information to target the exact person they think will buy their products. All of googles free products are paid for by the worth of your personal data they collect.

Ecosystem and other reasons are mentioned already in comments.

One more I would add to that would be, providing these services and making huge number of users depend on it and habituate them to use it. Later in life it is impossible for people to learn new similar tool as they are already use to this and work can be done. In case, there is enough data that the individual won't think to migrate outside then they can charge for service and increase it subsequently.

Later it becomes hard for other competition to stay in market because user cannot let go this service and switch to new.

Google also seems to offer products for free (I think they are free… correct me if wrong) to schools, which is sorta a public service, but also indoctrinates younger people into continuing to use google products into adulthood.