Google Drive
drive.google.com
drive.google.com
If you violate this commandment, you will eventually lose your data.
Commandment: Test your backups.
If you violate this commandment, you will discover that you weren't ACTUALLY making backups.
If a user goes from 1 copy (hard drive), to 2 copies, then it's a net gain for their backups.
If a user goes from 2 copies (hard drive, some backup system), to 2 copies (hard drive, Google drive), then yes, arguably, it's a net loss for their backups, because they can simultaneously have a HD failure and get locked out of their Google account.
But arguably, they could live in Joplin, MO and both of their current backups could be toast.
Best to have three - hard drive, backup drive in a safety deposit box, and Google Drive if you like the convenience and access and cost, and don't mind the privacy implications.
I don't mind the privacy implications. Google doing something evil with user's data would be absolute suicide for them.
If you also use two-factor authentication, I daresay that you are in the 99th percentile, or higher.
The use case is simple - When I put data on something, It must be available to me.
I can't learn how to be a sysadmin or expect my father to do that just to use this service.
I'm not sure if GDrive has file versioning/restoration built into it or not, but there is an important distinction to be made here.
If you violate this commandment, you will eventually lose users trust.
User Commandment : Once I sync the data, it must be available to me without any hassles on demand.
The usual technical lectures to users asking them to do things instead of making 'just work' don't fly.
That is why they ship TV's(with channels), Washing machines(with timers) and microwave ovens(with presets) without you having to bother too much about frequencies, volume/rotations and wave equations.
The user wants a product that 'works' the way he wants.
Their automated recovery systems are good enough such that you don't need an actual person. It nags you all the time to enter a phone number and recovery email, and reminds you of the recovery email from time to time.
the problem is that essential work products like gmail and drive are bundled with social elements like g+ or youtube which I'm starting to dislike more and more.
If I didn't already know what the product is, I would have no idea what I'm looking at. Is it a cyberlocker? Is it a Dropbox clone? Is it a social file editor?
Heck, the landing page could almost just be describing the previous Google Docs functionality.
The most innovative features, OCR and image recognition, are buried away with almost no description of just how useful they might be (privacy issues aside). The file revisions feature is sorely lacking in detail.
Also, the amount of white space feels excessive. Was a second page for features even necessary or couldn't that have just all been on the main page?
I'm sure the product is great and all, but this page is completely useless to send to less technical friends or family members.
Edit: If you want to compare it to Google's other downloadable software landing pages:
Ideally, I want to see a few images to get an idea of what the product is. If I'm interested, I'll watch the video to actually see how it works.
There are things you notice in a video you'd never grasp just from a few pictures, just like how a few pictures can sometimes explain things much better than a lot of words.
The only time I prefer video is when it is something that truly benefits from being demonstrated in a way that is cumbersome to describe in words. Working with software is almost always best described in words with some pictures, but I found videos extremely helpful in origami.
For me:
1. I need much more space than 100GB - I'd ideally like a TB+ on the cloud.
2. The price has to be more acceptable. Say the cost of a TB hard drive on an annual basis. I'm not even going to talk about the likely $1000+ bill for a TB of space at the current price point.
3. I have to admit that Dropbox is pretty cool when it comes to a smooth, painless experience.
There are three inter-related concepts: backup (mirror of your hdd), archiving (extension of your hdd), sync (subset of files on multiple devices) and sharing.
But if you're ok with using different services for different purposes, you can easily get what you want.
To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage.
For backup, pay $50/yr to Backblaze.
If you try to use a service optimized for sharing and sync (Dropbox) for archival and backup, you're going to experience friction.
Just my two cents.
Note that Flickr will only archive certain types of media—you can't store your RAW files or other related stuff (presets, actions) with them. I believe Smugmug and a few of the other services do this, though.
I just tend to think that the optimal cloud solution is as close to invisible as possible while letting people use whichever software tools they need. I don't really see any single entity owning the software and the storage because no single entity can own the collaboration tools. I view collaboration and syncing as two distinct business lines without a whole lot of interdependence. Personally I use Google docs once in a blue moon, and even when I do, I don't see how Google Drive makes that process any easier.
It may be that I just don't understand the product, but I don't think this will be any more successful than its competitors except for the fact that, when compared to Dropbox, it is substantially cheaper. But then again, Dropbox may be able to parter with Amazon to keep Google out of the space as much as possible and keep costs down.
For me, the fundamental problem with a service like Google Docs is that it is the ONLY way I can edit a document.
Whereas on my computer, I can open a .doc file (synced with Dropbox) in Word, TextEdit, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, or just about any other document editor. Doubly so for more platform-agnostic files (e.g. txt, jpg, pdf, etc).
(This is also why, unlike Steve Jobs, I hope files and the file system never die.)
The biggest problem with the file-based route is when you have multiple people working on one file. You can't work on it at the same time (or you have a merge problem.) You have to sidechannel quite a bit about which version is the current "master". All kinds of issues that are solved by using a non-file-centric document.
Syncing solutions should not dictate which software you use. One environment should be completely agnostic of others and only be tied together by file formats. So my original point was that I don't see the value add in Google Drive overtaking Dropbox just because it has accompanying productivity software. I think the software has to stand on its own, which I do not believe it can do.
Easier to explain via my own example: I have Dropbox, and I'm also a fairly heavy docs user. Now that's there's Drive, it's a no-brainer to just take all my files out of Dropbox and drop them into Drive so when I'm looking for something like a letter from last year, I only have to search one web site / app and it's got everything from docs to PDF scans. There's no comparable way of going the other direction (moving all my files to Dropbox) without losing a ton of functionality. Word is good, but it's really primitive compared to Doc at this point when it comes to collaborative work and access on my phone, tablet, etc.
It's also worth noting that in the case of Google Docs, Drive isn't really a syncing solution (unless you're using Docs in offline mode) since there's no files to sync. It's just a way to access your docs.
The only "startup" I have seen that rivals their quality of marketing videos is Square. Does anyone know how much producing video like this costs?
The ability of a marketing department/agency to distill the product, it's benefits, how it relates to the brand and why you need it is something you can't really quantify. If you watch Mad Men think of the effort that goes into a pitch meeting. That is what you pay for. And that can cost a lot.
Not yet. There is no broad based Linux support yet (it supports Android, which is technically Linux, but no Linux Desktop distro is supported) and iOS support is still in the works.
Not being able to include other folders would pretty much be a deal-breaker for me :( Any ideas?
I've symlinked my ~/Documents folder into my Dropbox folder and now I rarely manually put anything into ~/Dropbox.
I wonder if it's because they know people use Dropbox this way, but they want you to put your documents into Google Docs directly?
It's really annoying that this use case wasn't thought about.
You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video.
Download it from Adobe.
The YouTube HTML5 player is still in trial mode, just not stable enough to use on the homepage of a major product launch.
All in good time, there are definitely people at Google working on it :-)
20 GB ($5.00 USD per year) 80 GB ($20.00 USD per year) 200 GB ($50.00 USD per year) 400 GB ($100.00 USD per year) 1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
There is nothing yet under the Learn More link, but it says that my next charge will occur next year. I hope that means old storage buyers are being grandfathered in.
Thinking about it some more, I should've gotten 200GB for $50.
[1] That is, Dropbox's philosophy is to create something dead simple that an idiot can use, whereas I suspect Google's product will be laden with options and knobs. I don't knock on Dropbox - I'm constantly recommending it to people that aren't tech-savvy (and it's one of the few things they understand and start using quickly), but I personally like those knobs and levers. Am I the only one here that doesn't think they're direct competition with each other? They're in the same space and all but I think they're meant for different niches.
And no linux client.
Seems like the general idea could be used on other distros.
As a statisfied dropbox user, with only ~200mb used, I don't need to pay for the service. Yet I recently wanted to show my support by taking their lowest possible plan. (I thought this would put me back 15-30 dollars a year).
Yet the lowest thing they offer is 9.99 a month. I found that suprising
Nevermind. Looks like I'm sticking with dropbox.
2. I disconnected, And when I tried to sync back up it wanted my Google drive folder to be empty. It wanted to re-sync everything from the online Drive account. It wouldn't pick up where it left off.
I stopped using it right away.
That was my experience. I'm sure they will fix it. Unless I'm using it wrong.
Google Drive's Mac client is written in Python, just like Dropbox's, for example.
I think it's awesome. Especially the search integration and ability to build apps. Dropbox is dead.
Dropbox has said that unlike iCloud or SkyDrive, they're the only ones offering a truly cross-platform offering, that doesn't favor any one OS or platform over any other. Selling out to one of the big companies (except maybe Amazon/Facebook) would sacrifice that.
Not to mention, Drew Houston already turned down a 9-figure offer from Steve Jobs so I doubt he's interested in selling.
DropBox works great for me on OSX, Windows, and a couple of Linux variants. I just can't see Microsoft, Canonical or Apple going out of their way to make things work well across platforms.
And Google Drive probably ties into Google+, which kills it for me.
If say, Microsoft bought Dropbox, would you then no longer trust them?
Interested in the reasoning here.
Second, possibly related to the first point, it seems the other companies are doing cloud storage to sell their other products. SkyDrive ties in with Office Live, Google Drive with Google+, etc.
There's always a risk a company will either shut down a business (Symbian, Wave, MySpace, Delicious), or go out of business (Chumby), or get bought and have their business shutdown (Sidekick, Drop.io). I don't think you can really know the future enough to make product choices based on the chance that will happen.
The laws don't apply to Google here because there's significant competition (SkyDrive, iCloud, Dropbox and others) so no monopoly. And Google is also fine in markets like search where they are the dominant player unless they start doing dumb things like penalising companies for advertising on other search engines.