Google Drive is a sad joke, don't use it for business | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive is a sad joke, don't use it for business

support.google.com

41 pointsTooSmugToFail17 comments

And the Google's solution to the problem: "This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

2020's Microsoft: became 2005's Google

2020's Google: became 2005's Microsoft

Except the 2005's Microsoft would still support all their current and legacy products and services as they still do today(heck, I can run the binaries I built back in school in 2001 on my current Windows 10 setup) while Google abandons them in their bottomless graveyard as soon as the paint dries and moves on to the next shiny thing.

Google is not becoming the new Microsoft but the new Intel/Boeing; no need to rectify anything as long as that sweet ad money keeps coming in.

Google is like politicians and infrastructure: they love cutting ribbons and announcing new things but nobody likes maintaining existing stuff as it gets you no fame.

Both these comments really hit the nail on the head. It's a very nice summary of google as a company, worsening everyday in their quality of the product and morality of the decision making process and on top of that the nightmare of dropping product and automated support nightmares.

Can Google change direction and improve like Microsoft did? Or are they on the path of becoming a 2020 IBM in a few years?

Google can change direction very well. They do so every two weeks, it feels like.

A week ago, after 6 months of trying to use google drive in my business, I gave up and paid for Dropbox teams.

I want to sync folders to my PC to access them instantly -and Google Drive is a mess, often freezes my file explorer - and takes forever.

Dropbox just works. I have having to pay that much for it, but better that than being frustrated with the Google Drive I already paid for as part of Gsuite...

I've recently moved from Dropbox to Google One, with syncing being managed by Insync [0].

[0] https://www.insynchq.com/

Sadly we started using Google Drive almost at the beginning of the company 5 years ago because the collaborative features in docs were really good, but it's a complete train wreck and so completely regret it.

Got to be honest. After using them all, Microsoft's cloud office solution is the least crap. It's the one thing I miss moving to Linux.

As one example of many of a fundamental use-case that's broken...

Permission group to Edit rights on a doc or folder, then add user to that group - the new user does not automatically inherit those permissions. Doc/folder needs to have the group's permissions modified manually to accept any group membership changes.

I ultimately automated this with a GAM script, but it's absolutely insane that I had to do this.

Aside from that, for a small company, I miss having a single common directory tree with an organized collection of company documents. With Google Drive, everyone's view is different and documents are lost when someone leaves.

Another issue that I find absurd: if I share a folder with a group in gsuite (aka mailing list), and add or remove members to the group, the permissions are not automatically updated.

Really? wtf

I remember writing a small GDrive client a few years ago and not liking the GDrive API and the way they handle files vs. folders at all. I would definitely not pay for this service.

Another thing that bugs me: you cant see what you have shared!

It's a security nightmare.

That is a bit disingenuous; it maybe has issues in syncing with folders or such, but honestly when you work directly in the drive for your document creation and sharing and co-authoring, its a breeze.

It is good for certain use cases, and bad for others, what a big surprise, now lets not generalize.

McDonalds fries are a sad joke and I'm going to rant about them online to enlighten the world! I personally desire to have exactly 114g fries where each one is 58.9mm. From now on I'm getting my fries from Burger King where I can have it my way!

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