Google is rebranding storage plans as “Google One”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They're going to try to unify lots of different benefits under a single, high-value subscription. The storage plans and priority support are just the first benefit they've tied to the subscription.
> In addition to access to experts, the company also promises to provide subscribers with other benefits. Google One’s director Larissa Fontaine told me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, preferred rates for other Google services or credits on Google Play. “We hope to build those out over time,” she noted.
That would make more sense as to why they're "rebranding" these plans an not just updating Google Drive's pricing plans. "Google One" isn't a single product, it's a single subscription across many products, just like Amazon Prime.
Of course, I could be wrong.
It does seem like a weird way to launch the subscription if that's what they're trying to do, since the announcement goes deep into the weeds of storage. And the low-end plans seem much too cheap to be able to add meaningful benefits to in the future.
Even the idea of multiple tiers of the subscription might be too complicated. One of the nice things about Prime is that although it's expensive, there's only one option.
Seeing as this is Google we're talking about, I could imagine this new subscription will have incredible amounts of churn in branding, pricing and benefits along the way, and probably end up as a confusing mess in the minds of customers. Amazon's Prime took a very different route. It started out as a very clear subscription service for cheaper shipping, and then added more and more benefits as time went on. These days it's a little confusing, but it didn't start that way. If Google already can't get the messaging to be clear, it doesn't bode well for them adding lots of orthogonal benefits in the future and keeping it all sane.
I bet we'll see a Stratechery article about Google One in the context of Amazon Prime soon.
This makes me sad, as it's my primary gripe with Amazon Prime. The only Prime service I actually use is free 2-day shipping. But they keep lumping more and more stuff in there -- video streaming, movies, photos, music, etc -- and the price keeps going up. Sooner or later it's not going to be worth the free 2-day shipping and I'm going to have to go back to paying for shipping and waiting around for stuff to arrive.
I'd be very sad if Google decided to emulate this :(
Consider Newspaper subscriptions. Would you rather separately pay $X/month to New York Times, WashingtonPost, The Atlantic, The Economist, etc just to read a few articles, or would you rather pay $X/mo to Texture or a Spotify-for-News, and then have access to every newspaper, friction and worry free?
I'm an Amazon Prime customer and I love it. Not just for the delivery, but also for the video, Amazon Fresh, and pretty much everything else.
When the price of the bundle exceeds greatly the price of everything else, I might start to be concerned.
But in general, I find unbundled stuff more expensive.
Besides, bundling usually means someone down the pipeline -- usially the producers -- are getting royally screwed.
For ad-driven sites, it becomes crucial to keep viewers engaged as often and as long as possible. Every second spent on Facebook is another shot at an ad impression, every video on YouTube another chance for a pre-roll ad. Cue Facebook's notification spam and YouTube's autoplay.
In a bundled service, the incentives shift. The provider's revenue will stay mostly constant, as long as they can demonstrate enough value for me to maintain the subscription. I might still get the good parts (next episode in a series autoplays), but I'll be spared the clickbaity follow-up video that autoplays because there wasn't any other related item.
I’m looking forward to reading whatever Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) has to say on the undelying business model implications
You can already pay for that for Gmail. You have been able to for years.
"we never collect or use data from G Suite services for any advertising purposes" https://gsuite.google.com/security/
I am not convinced this can happen. It seems that ads is the only form of micro payment that really works at scale.
However, I love Google Products. Photos is awesome. Inbox makes my mail manageable, etc.
I am sadly probably in a minority, but I would pay a good price to have all these products without any ad targeting.
Ad revenue at Google / Facebook scale is a magic money box. In that they can tell Wall Street (and deliver) ever increasing monetization per user.
Once they start directly charging users, they can't increase that invisibly via "better" ad tech anymore. Any increase is directly passed on to the consumer. AND ceiling just became users * subscription fee.
The market's a lot smaller, but it looks a lot like the same information asymmetry that led to more and more complicated instruments being created and sold (in what was at its base a game of trying to push leverage).
I would be curious to know how many people are subscribed to this service.
It’s also hard to know what "Google" means from its name. And "Windows". And "Bing". And "Facebook", "Twitter", "WhatsApp", "Amazon", "Yelp", "Pocket", "Chrome", "Firefox", "Safari", "Uber", "Steam", and many more.
From Webster's: "a sharp shrill bark or cry (as of a dog or turkey)"[0]
Disc: Googler.
Getting one of these phones in the US comes with other risks as well since your importing g from China. No warranty for one. Little you can do if the phone is delivered to you in some defective state. I only have full 3G coverage with AT&T. That said other experiences I've read on Xioami's phones have been largely positive. Really cannot stress how amazing of a deal the MI A1 is. Feels like a spiritual successor to the Nexus line.
You're thinking of Android Go. Android One is for phones, not made by Google, that receive guaranteed OS and security updates. All of Nokia's phones are Android One phones.
Interesting point !
I already see Youtube Red as a very high value bundle : no ads on Youtube, offline mode, picture in picture AND that's only on top of Play Music for the same price as any other music service. All of this is sadly region limited though.
It never occurred to me that the champion of bundling is Amazon Prime.
It will be interesting to see how Google moves in this direction.
Storage is a cheap benefit to provide for the average user who won't use it all. YouTube Red is already $9.99 - just add the 2TB Drive option for free and starting selling everyone on the Google One branding. Please don't screw this up?
Not only that, but they'll have to decide where the borders of the subscription are—is YouTube a separate entity, and thus should keep it's own subscription model? or is it too valuable and thus should be part of Google One? Either direction will have complexity issues, either in continuing to have too many different subscriptions, or in trying to capture value with too many orthogonal benefits in a single pricing system.
I can easily see something similar happening with youtube red for example. Youtube free, Youtube 'one' & Youtube red.
You would also be getting Google Play Music since its bundled with Red.
Case in point, the Hacker News title was renamed to be "more clear" to "Google is rebranding storage plans as 'Google One'", totally missing the point.
By contrast, every Amazon service I've dealt with has been either explicitly experimental (and not "experimental" in the Google sense, but something that actually seems like a distinct trial run) or has lasted for years at a minimum.
"Amazon Killing Off its $60/Year Plan for Unlimited Storage"
"Amazon is killing off its Music Storage subscription service"
"Amazon to discontinue Fresh delivery in some states"
"Amazon is shutting down its 'Underground Actually Free' program"
"Amazon Will Discontinue Its Vendor Express Platform"
etc...
This is huge. Together with having removed ads that scanned your e-mail from consumer Gmail, it looks like Google's consumer offerings could actually be changing course from "you're the product" to "you're the customer" -- or at least be giving you the choice.
Of course, you could always get a single-seat G Suite for business account for $5 or $10/mo. with 24/7 phone support too, but it was a little too complicated and inflexible for most consumers.
While gmail support is notoriously awful, I've been extremely impressed with my call-in support for my Google Fi, Nexus phones, and Pixel buds. So when you pay for the product, they do (/can) support it well.
I would love a general paid-Google (a la Amazon Prime) plan, which aligns incentives a little better.
I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical.
Still, I called into Fi support. Not only were they completely unapologetic for the phone bricking, but they also had literally only one phone available for sale -- the new $700+ Pixel XL. I didn't want that phone. They offered no discount. Their answer was "you can wait a month until we get new phones". I had to buy a phone (grudgingly) from Verizon.
Overall, one of the worst experiences I've had with a Telecom company -- and it's not like I've had any experiences I would describe as "jolly".
I experienced the same issue with the replacement device about 2 months after the original warranty expired. They replaced it out-of-warranty, with overnight shipping, for free.
Each time, I interacted with Project Fi support via web chat.
I had the same exact issue with my Pixel XL. I did buy it used, so yeah I know. I just set the phone down, it looked like it froze and rebooted, but the screen just turned off and that was it. That was a month after the warranty expired. I'm on my second one, so we'll see how this goes.
It's a paid consumer product whose core element is storage space for use with other Google services.
I believe you get three free calls for every licence you buy (home/basic licences only get one or get none, depending on the product).
*This is all based off of my experience from many years ago so it might not be true any more.
At least for partners. I haven’t had much experience with regular end-user support, so I won’t make any bold claims about that.
About fucking time.
I know so many people who will never purchase another Google product because it's was literally impossible to get another human being on the other end of the line.
I think Google's mostly got bad support for services (particularly free ones) whose scaling relied on near-zero marginal cost, and that is because scaling support isn't cheap even if scaling the underlying service is.
OTOH, if their storage charges are enough above costs to support the support burden for their consumer products for a customer, rolling consumer support into their storage plans resolved that scaling issue.
They've offered chat and phone support for their phones and Google Play for years. I've never had a problem chatting or talking to a CSR on the phone. In fact, every Nexus and Pixel phone has a built in 24/7 support app that allows you to chat, talk or get a call back from a support person.
With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.
The first rule of UX and branding is: don't make me think. Using a digit in a brand name is a question mark, just like Google Plus. Or was it Google+? It gets in the way of the meat of your message.
Why would Google would rub up against Microsoft OneDrive with Google (One?) Drive? Is it going to be Google1? 1Google? OneGoogle?
The Google Bundle/Spire thing could be called Google Together, or Google Everything, or Google Red, and it would be as effective without the confusion.
I don't know what this is and the brand confusion pushes me toward other more clearly defined storage services. I pay for Dropbox...because I know what it does and it won't go away.
Cloud storage was the primary service, so there's precedent for the 'One' used I this context.
Beancounters running the asylum. Corporate envy: "Their name is cooler than ours!"
Probably just a blip of an impact overall, but greater than zero.
I mean come on, I know it's a very generic name, but it's nearly identical to one of their biggest competitors in this exact space.
Google One
...
Both in storage?
That's a massive trademark dispute waiting to happen. People will easily start assuming OneDrive refers to Google's offering and confuse the hell out of them.
I don't see that happening here.
Did I do it right?
Are there any upload/download caps in place? Are they documented?
Are they scanning it?
Downsampling it?
Checking it against some DMCA database?
What happens when Junior shares his Bluray rips with his buddies at school?
Are they blocking rclone? How about 6 months from now?
Net neutrality is toast, caps are the norm and they're closing the service in 6 months, but it will take you a year to get the files back, is there a snowball offer?
After the one drive and amazon about faces, can anyone take them seriously.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/802ygu/-/dustd...
> Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork-so you can focus on the things that matter. Sign in and put your creative energy to work.
NOOO!!!! Just store my files damn it!
What does my area have to do with an online storage offering? I'm not giving them my zipcode.
Anyway, taking all bets on whether this doppelganger will be killed off, or whether two more doppelgangers will be launched.
The downside is that Dropbox is expensive although it blows all the storage companies in terms of features and stability while icloud is too basic.
My guess is they want to collect enough data from these service interactions to eventually replace the service people with AI (or even plan on A/Bing some AIs right away to see how much people notice, sort of a crow sourced turing test).
Not sure how the new support feature compares to free/paid Apple support options. Not a lot of details on it yet.
Not trying to shill this crypto(because I dont know if it really works). But this crypto claims to be selling 1TB/2$/mo
https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
So is Sia coin actually cheaper than these big players? Or are there hidden fees?
Sounds like you have your answer?
I dont think its fair to make a conclusion without having evidence.
But... but... but... Apple is always more expensive than Google! I'm just paying for the brand!
edit: Maybe more of a compilation of google apps for business with drive?
It's being rebranded to separate it from Drive.
And they have firm plans to make it family-shareable soon, and less firm plans to bundle other ancillary benefits with it down the line.
> Initially, Google One will only be available on a limited basis. If you have a paid Drive storage plan, you’ll be automatically upgraded to Google One over the coming months. Look out for an email with details on your new benefits.
I worked for RealNetworks a long, long time ago and I remember when we came out with RealPlayer One in 2002. This was an effort to bring a bunch of products together in the face of competition from MS and others. The vision and company failed spectacularly.
The "One" branding strategy strikes me as a way to bring together disparate offerings that people can't articulate easily to users and probably shouldn't be bundled together. Maybe Google is about to do the same:
"Google One’s director Larissa Fontaine told me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, preferred rates for other Google services or credits on Google Play".
Giving you discounts if you use google search. Not sure they are using their search dominance innovatively or abusing it to promote this.
The actual brand is distinctly non-communicative, and the vague ideas for ancillary benefits seem a bit odd with no relation to the core product.
On second thought, why couldn't this be a $9.99 a month bundle of YouTube Red, 1TB Google Drive, Google Play Music, some Google Voice credits, and add free Google Search?
> It’s also rebranding these storage plans (but not Google Drive itself) as “Google One.”
> Google will upgrade all existing storage plans to Google One accounts
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google-one/
Maybe it is time for me to switch away from Dropbox?
Previously, one of the main advantages of Dropbox was their reliable sync client but this attribute is fading away: When I do many little file operations on Windows (npm, TeX Live), I expect to see MsMpEng.exe to eat away my CPU cycles. This is somewhat expected from an on demand antivirus scanner and as a Windows user it is somewhat common to whitelist some project folders or temporarily disable the AV before starting certain tasks. On macOS the same thing happens thanks to Dropbox! Even outside of my Dropbox folder their sync client seems to intercept all file operations and do some CPU-heavy calculations on them. I don't know when this started and what the technical explanation for this is but at some time the Dropbox client on the Mac started to cause a system-wide performance regression.
What is the state of Google One sync client? In the past I read some bad reports about it but after several rebrandings maybe it has matured technically?
I generally look at AV as effectively useless and badly made, your system will speed up a lot in general (independent of dropbox) if you stop using it.
> Some third-party apps access files in your Dropbox folder. Dropbox may interpret this access as edits to the files, and sync these perceived changes. If a third-party app continually requests access to your files, Dropbox will continue to sync, which will in turn lead to high CPU usage.
> This loop usually occurs with third-party syncing apps, backup apps, and anti-virus or security software, or when a third-party app is installed within the Dropbox folder.
You need your own domain to be able to use G Suite.
To answer your question: I don't recall ever seeing ads on the Gmail interfaces of any of my G Suite email accounts.
You can disable scrapping though. Ie you get generic ads
Sounds like they undercutting AppleCare ha