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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

"Unlimited" is a marketing term with a very specific meaning. It means "limited".

This is such a hacker view.

"GMail offers unlimited email storage, I can encode arbitrary data in an email. Therefore GMail offers unlimited storage! Wait, they banned me? HOW DARE THEY, FALSE ADVERTISING!"

Where back in the human world its not ambiguous at all what what Google, and every other service ever, means by this and is completely correct to call it unlimited.

"Limited, but we won't tell you the limit."

Yeah, and "tasty" is a specific marketing term meaning "poisonous", which I won't explain to you when I offer you a tasty sandwich.

Marketing does not create reality, no matter how much marketers may think otherwise. Words have meanings, you can't unilaterally attach some new one to a word and expect people to agree with it.

Marketing doesn't create reality, but the courts do and sometimes what a word means in a legal context is different than in conversation. It usually hinges on some standard of being reasonable.

Sure, and marketing which expects people to use their standard of "being reasonable", while the service being offered under a different standard of "being reasonable", is essentially bait and switch. That only a small subset of customers notice it doesn't make it more OK, it only shows the company is not dumb.

I don't know if I'd call it a bait-and-switch. Gmail is an email service and the purpose is to send and receive emails. Getting upset that you can't use it as a general purpose storage service isn't reasonable (IMHO). There was no baiting in this regard.

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