> I'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer.
I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.
Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.
It's not uncommon to see an individual fire engine in the US with 800-1000 feet of supply hose. I don't know if that's a common configuration in a dense city like NYC, but it's certainly a reasonable amount per engine.
> That sounds counterintuitive . What about higher pressure will slow water down?
It sounds counterintuitive because it's not worded well. Imagine a garden hose with no nozzle: The water doesn't go very far, but you can fill a bucket with it pretty quickly. You can also restrict the flow by putting your thumb over the end of the hose. That increases the pressure and allows you to fill up a bucket farther away, but it takes longer because you've lowered the volume (GPM) of water flowing from the hose.
Firefighters use nozzle tips of different sizes to make trade offs between pressure and volume.
I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.
Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.