Firstly, apple doesn’t compete on price. Even if icloud is priced more than google people would always buy apple just for the ecosystem integration. It’s not even a competition to be honest.
Look up “buy or build” which is the industry term for this kind of evaluation: buy product and use it/resell it or build your own.
Apple has gone for different strategies in various areas:
Build own Apple silicon chips, do not buy off the shelf chips from intel or nvidia or amd.
Buy and resell google storage but don’t want to build their own distributed data store for end users.
It’s about what matters more for the company and the core products. Apple’s laptops, cell phones are considered core products. Icloud is a value add.
This is also why apple is making their own cell phone broadband chips. For most companies, this is a “buy from qualcolm” but apple needs to build their own for independence for their number 1 core product: the iphone.
one issue is that modern ransomeware groups are also being hunted themselves - there are many ransomeware orgs that are themselves being ransomed so are not reliable.
even if you pay the ransom to the 1st group, the 2nd group will leak.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
I like the inclusion of the bibliography. I should do that with all my blog posts too (even if it's links to other posts, etc, the references still help to understand the post)
Isn't the solution for this Robin character to provide another card, one that this person actually owns, and provide 12,500 from that card directly? And if Robin doesn't want to pay, to start legal proceedings toward recovering the funds from Robin?
How is the bank or Upwork the bad guy here when it is Robin who doesn't want to pay?
every time I see any startup run "games" on some aspect of daily life, it's going to go into killer robots in the end.