Cheap, off-brand USB chargers often have poor or no circuit isolation. Some have even been tested to expose one leg of full AC current to the USB ground. Not a problem until you're between that and a ground.
People whose reactions when confronted with something new, unknown, and unexpected are to laugh at it or respond sarcastically, instead of to accept the surprise, approach with curiosity and humility, and question if there is something they're not understanding, are unlikely to ever discover anything new.
Everything that we call science today was once alternately laughable or mysterious.
I also used to do exactly this. Except with Safari as my untrusted 3rd. Eventually, I just got tired of the trouble and found that having a complete, searchable web history was actually so much a useful feature for me. So I stopped pretending and sold out to Google completely.
A guy in my office ordered a 60-inch LCD TV. They delivered. Two weeks later another arrived. Customer service wouldn't acknowledge the first, so now he has two.
Exactly right. For at least some of the 99% of startups that are not VC-backed, it can be the constant struggle between working /on/ the business and working /in/ the business, when resources are limited. That can mean a CTO deep in the code on a daily basis, or even the CEO taking a project from time to time. When you're small and broke, you just get what needs to be done, done, regardless of titles.
This makes sense. But, for many (at least bootstrapping) startups, $1800/mo for the database is not in the realm of the possible. Is not having to deal with (future) sharding headaches "worth" that much? Sure. But that doesn't mean it's possible.
So by pricing us out of the entry level, you will forgo having startups build their platforms on it and get hooked (while it's still at 1-node mysql scale).
When the sharding headache hits and they're scrambling to scale, will they switch to Spanner? Maybe. Probably. They'll want to, anyway. But there is a big market that will be missed.