Microsoft’s cloud service SkyDrive is great, and no one has noticed | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s cloud service SkyDrive is great, and no one has noticed

venturebeat.com

128 pointsrfreytag128 comments

I've used it, it seemed great. There are a couple reasons I don't use it, though:

1. It's not Microsoft's bread and butter. History has shown when it's no longer cost-effective, they'll drop it or neglect it in a heartbeat.

2. Say it does become wildly successful and pushes out its major competition (Dropbox & Drive), history has shown they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold (eg. IE, Office, Hotmail, etc etc etc).

Microsoft has awesome, awesome engineering people. They just need to change their vision and their leadership.

I get the feeling you haven't used IE, hotmail and office for a while. They're definitely not rotting.

They are not rotting today, but only because of competitive pressure from Firefox, Chrome, GMail, Yahoo and Open Office. There was a long period of MS lounging after winning the space.

Yes, competition drives innovation.

This will not go away, so I wouldn't worry about it.

successful companies cannibalize themselves before the competition does not after.

I use IE and Office daily. You didn't read my statement correctly:

"they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold"

Fair point - I agree there.

The same IE that had a major bug recently and Governments everywhere were recommending to move away from it?

Every browser suffers this occasionally. In fact every piece of software does. To suddenly throw it all out is childish. Look at the SQL injection vulnerability in rails recently. Has that killed it? Looks at the java vulnerability. Has that killed it? Look at the number of ssh worms - has that killed it?

>Looks at the java vulnerability. Has that killed it?

    <post type="cynical">

With any luck...

    </post>

Your parent is referring to the long time period before Firefox really took off that IE6 was Microsoft's best offering, and we've all heard how terrible it was ad nauseum. Even once FF took off, it took them years, until IE9 in fact, to release a browser that could be considered semi-modern and standards compliant, and it still is missing a number of important features, and isn't even available on Windows XP.

That IE is no longer rotting is certainly true, but that's only because of the competitive pressure from FF (and now Chrome and Safari as well, of course.)

Pretty sure they see the SAS office stuff as their bread and butter going forward - they have been steering SMB to office 365 for more than a year.

But it was relatively neglected between the 2003 and 2010 versions. Not many new features were added or innovations made, aside from the Ribbon interface and new theming.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/faqs.aspx

Q. What is the difference between Office and Office 365?

Office is productivity software (including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote) that is installed on your desktop or laptop computer. Office 365 is an online subscription service that provides email, shared calendars, the ability to create and edit documents online, instant messaging, web conferencing, a public website for your business, and internal team sites—all accessible anywhere from nearly any device.

> history has shown they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold (eg. IE, Office, Hotmail, etc etc etc).

Umm, Microsoft has neglected Office? What's your definition of neglecting?

- Spending more than 100 million anually in R&D dollars on Office?

- Employing some of their top talent on it?

- Giving Office their own division inside of Microsoft?

- having the second largest head count of any division in Microsoft?

- cannibalizing some of their own sales to move it to the web while desktop sales are still at all time highs?

Neglecting: Throwing little more than a new coat of paint on something and incrementing the version number.

And what has that $100m annually produced? The Ribbon interface? New themes?

You might argue Office 365, but I see that as a desperate reaction to the cannibalization Google Docs is causing them, not an innovation.

In all fairness, it's hard to improve without impetus. Madden (all sports, really) releases a new edition every year that's largely the same as the year before. Look at iOS6.

That said, some of MS's divisions could really use some turnover.

The usability of Office before the Ribbon vs. the usability of Office after the Ribbon is like night and day. It was a massive overhaul, and it was for the better - the product is, IMO, far easier to understand.

It's a huge innovation, and frankly I think it's silly to discount it as a "coat of paint".

For new users, perhaps. For people that have been using office since '97, it was a huge kick in the face.

That lasts a month or two.

They don't notice they're more productive later. "Oh, it was awful." And they're doing whizzier things faster than before.

Often, people just hate change.

>>Often, people just hate change.

No, people hate sudden change. When it comes to more gradual change, such as the user interface progression from XP to Vista and then to Win 7, it is totally fine. But going from Win 7 to Win 8? Not so much. (Yes, Win 8 will have an old-style UI option, but that's not the point.)

Strongly disagree. I am far less productive using the ribbon interface, and have been for years. I have never "gotten used to it."

Oh, come on. You seriously don't mean that. If you are you can't be using it much.

It's that hard to believe that I think one of their latest innovations sucks? I use Excel on a regular basis for simple regression analyses and data shuffling.

Any interface change is a kick in the face to people who have been heavy users of the software. That does not mean that every change is for the worse.

Which versions are you thinking of in particular? I know 2007 added OneNote, and from what I've been able to tell 2010 improved stability over 2007.

The Ribbon interface was a massive upgrade in usability for the office division, that I'm _still_ not sure how they pulled off as well as they did - I can easily imagine 20% of that $100mm went into the Ribbon interface.

For those of us who hop between Visio, Word, Excel, Power Point - it's been a godsend. I don't know of a single users who puts more than 10 hours / week that (after a month or two of grousing over how the new was crappier than the old) - didn't consider it a major upgrade - particularly as for keyboard jockeys - the old keyboard shortcuts are still there.

The transition to the old crufty Menu Interface to the Ribbon interface, in my mind, was as big a difference for my productivity as the transition from the "Different-Menu's-per-application" of the Legacy era to the "Standard-Menu's-per-app" of the Macintosh era.

Off the top of my head:

* A new, standardized document format that's trivial for hackers to open up and play with.

* More stability across the board

* New products added (OneNote is lovely for instance)

* More stable rendering - gone are the days (for me at least) where saving, closing and re-opening a Word document had things moving around

* Much more reliable saving and document recovery

* Creating Office Live and bringing it up to date with the new Windows family (Metro interface etc) which to me is a strong indicator they're not going to drop it any time soon

And of course, if it's great and you use it and they do drop it, you can just import your documents into Google Docs or <insert competitor software here> and get on with editing them.

And 'small things' like this;

http://rise4fun.com/QuickCode

SkyDrive is definitely Microsoft's bread and butter. Microsoft Office created $15 billion in profit for Microsoft last year, and collaboration is now an essential feature of productivity software.

SkyDrive is good, but Google Drive is way faster, especially if you replace the default Google client with a third party one like SyncDocs.

What makes me the most suspicious of it is the content policy they have in place and I've been told they're actually enforcing. Basically it says you can't have certain things in skydrive, otherwise they'll terminate all the services connected to your Microsoft account. It's not that hard to imagine a scenario where this could be a problem. Say you have image auto-upload on on your Lumia, and in a party some drunken fellow decides to take a picture of his naughty bits. Off goes your MS account and all the services and data with it?

You can very well have the same issue with Google. There are folks who have had their Google account shut down for some innocuous issue with Gmail, G+. It hasn't necessarily lead to an exodus from Google.

I think the reference[1] is to the person who got all his MS access suspended (including XBOX Live and other unrelated stuff) because he had some deemed illegal (by MS) pictures in his private storage. What Google examples are there of that? Google also cuts off ONLY the service you are supposedly abusing; if you abuse adsense, you cannot use adsense anymore, you CAN use adwords, gmail and others with the same account. MS seems to cut off complete access to everything.

Disclaimer: this is what I read in previous HN post; I did not try (and will not try) Skydrive until fully debunked. I have no mercy, interest or would ever use services that automatically cut off multiple services for something I do with my private storage. If I cannot post photos of my kids playing naked in a pool in our garden on my private storage then what is that private storage for exactly? Showing those scary American family portraits (example: http://iso-100.com/images/photos/SlacumFamilyPortrait.jpg) and that's it?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086

Yes, this was the incident I was referring to. Pardon for omitting the source reference.

EDIT: And yes, I'm aware that Google and probably all the other providers as well do this with the publicly shared pictures. But they should have no business monitoring privately stored data. Maybe hash checking for known illegal files (CP and similar) could be an exception.

Where does it stop though? Checking for known child pornography is of course a very valid reason and the law enforcement agencies have hashes for a lot of those images. However if you make that exception, other 'illegal' things would have to be screened as well and then you have where we are now. Why not make different categories of 'illegal'; CP matching hashes is a direct hit and gone you are. While 'illegal to distribute' (which probably gets more pressure to fight against than even cp) would be flagged in private; if you move it to public you have a problem.

I believe that private means you cannot touch it at all, but we are talking 'the cloud' here so that option is out the door anyway.

I used a predecessor to SkyDrive called Windows Live Sync (a.k.a Windows FolderShare), which just synced folders on different computers.

They came out with a new version in 2010 called Windows Live Mesh which didn't support Windows XP--fine, no big deal. But then they announced that the old version would stop working. No upgrade path. Microsoft didn't host your files, just an index of the files, so it couldn't be that expensive.

I still find it inexplicable, but I've learned my lesson. Don't trust Microsoft to continue to support old products.

Live Mesh held so much promise that I am still a little disappointed that Microsoft decided to sunset it. Not only did it do what SkyDrive and Dropbox do today but it also did file and folder syncing, bookmark and application settings syncing along with Remote Desktop between shared machines. I think Live Mesh shutting down was one of the reasons why Ray Ozzie left MS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mesh

It's a bit more complicated. Mesh predates SkyDrive (and Dropbox for that matter). It was in beta since before Vista, if I'm not mistaken. It was truly visionary product. Then something happened and it never got released properly, instead FolderShare or Live Sync came up, which was a far cry from the original vision. Mesh beta continued to exist. The Live Mesh release appeared in 2010: functionally it became closer to the original beta, but very toned down (did you know that there was an idea of "Mesh apps"?). And then SkyDrive started to gain steam and recently its app was released. This app dropped shared folder sync and remote desktop features. Mesh is and was a superset of both SkyDrive and Live Sync apps.

One thing I love about the hacker culture is that it functions like a (somewhat dysfunctional) meritocracy. Software that is good will often gain kudos, and bad software will be torn apart in critiques.

This fails when it comes to large companies as old biases and conspiracy theories tend to kick in, but still, when Microsoft does something good, eventually people will fess up and write good things about it. It's definitely one of the nicer things about communities like this.

And OneNote is great too!

I miss Clippy !

Then you might like Ribbon Hero 2 [1], an interactive tour / tutorial around Microsoft Office starring clippy!

[1]: http://www.ribbonhero.com/news.html

Curiously this links to the lifecycle email thread - the idea is to create long running engagement with the user such that they learn things useful to them, also moving towards your product

So a game where Clippy needs to say and an image to a doc, is a good idea.

Oddly, by automating word I guess one product could be to create game engine for just such things.

Deity Here, yes. OneNote is one of those pieces of software I use honestly daily - bi-hourly, more or less, if only for Win+S - and no one knows about it! "Copy Text From Image" is also simply great. And I also use it to quickly document series of screenshots for functionality tests (or rather "worksforme"s).

I liked SkyDrive, but its Windows bias is pretty apparent. It won't sync Unix files that would be illegal on Windows (due to e.g. the filename) and the sync algorithm is pretty bad on OSX (frequently running my CPU up to 100%). These are some of the reasons why people distrust the Microsoft brand.

What's the connection between being unable to sync files with invalid filenames (from MSFT's perspective) and trust?

Discounting Microsoft's long history, if there's this much platform incongruity now, should we trust them to change that with time? If you were forced to place a bet, which service provider would you stake it on?

I've nothing against Microsoft, but I think the grandparent poster has a point.

I'm pretty sure I've had the opposite thing happen with Dropbox: files silently not syncing to my Windows machine until I corrected a filename on the Linux file. Definitely not a showstopper but the lack of a visible error message was annoying.

My concerns with using Microsoft services (or Apple, or Facebook, or Google or ...) is that they are a maintained by a single entity for the purpose of profit, and if that entity makes changes I do not like, or cancel a product, it is generally difficult to migrate to an alternative because of intentional technical lock-in. There are many good examples of when this does not happen, and for-profit software is great, but given the potential for it to happen, I feel a lot better using open software, and failing that, software that uses open and standard(ish) protocals and formats.

Note: I have not looked into SkyDrive, so they might not have any of these concerns.

I love Skydrive. It's the best of Dropbox combined with the best of Google Docs (even better, you get to use Office), and it all works so seamlessly I forget that I'm even using it. Maybe that's why nobody's talking about it, because it's not causing us any pain. Not to mention, it's decently cheaper than the other options and is well-integrated into all the devices I tend to use. The only pain point I still have (and nobody has solved this) is that both my wife and I have Live accounts, and we'd like to have a shared quota, with some private folders. For now we just log into the same account until a better solution is available.

I'm not using it to store racy pictures or my social security numbers, so I'm not too concerned with privacy implications; there's no privacy to be had online anyway. But given it integrates seamlessly with Office, OneNote, iOS (mostly), Windows, Android, Xbox, and the web, I have nothing to complain about. Like I said, it works so well I forget I'm even paying for it, which is the best kind of service.

> The only pain point I still have (and nobody has solved this) is that both my wife and I have Live accounts, and we'd like to have a shared quota, with some private folders. For now we just log into the same account until a better solution is available.

Can you clarify what your need is? If you share a folder (with edit permissions) with your wife's Microsoft account, she can simply edit the contents of the folder directly. I understand that doesn't give you a shared quota, but I'm not clear why that's necessary. Presumably you're not worried about your wife abusing your space, since you're currently just sharing the account, and also since you married her. If you just need more space, the expanded storage plans for SkyDrive are extremely cheap.

You could also create a group and use that to share with her. The group would get its own separate quota. I frankly haven't used groups much because I don't have a need for them, but I think they would be pretty much what you're asking for. It won't sync locally, though, if that's something you need.

Local sync is of course the main need, and why we can't currently go the sharing route. Without sync, Skydrive is largely useless. For now, logging into the same account is ok. However, with Windows 8 tying into the live ID, it would be better if we each had our own separate logins, but had "family share" folders, for things like family documents and pictures. You can do that now, but the folders wouldn't sync.

Nobody has solved the "family sync" problem yet. Give me separate accounts for each member, but have a shared space that everyone accesses, with local sync, and the ability to manage some sort of shared quota system (I don't want to have to pay for 3 accounts x 50GB, would rather pay once for 100GB allocated my own way). Especially when you tie such a system to Xbox live, you can start to see how a family-based cloud approach would be a killer app.

Thanks. :) I'll pass along the feedback.

HN doesn't talk a lot about Microsoft Office, but it's by far the world's dominant software application. American adults spend 35 billion hours in Office every year, compared to 15 billion hours in Facebook, and 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. Any service that handles document collaboration, such as Dropbox or Box, is dealing mostly with Microsoft Office files in the enterprise.

Shameless plug here, since we tackle the same problem: People want to collaborate in real-time, but they also want to use the standard Microsoft Office applications that they already know how to use (well, maybe not the HN crowd, but the corporate crowd). The way people use Office today is completely broken, with filenames like "Marketing_v133_Tuesday_v4_Final_ReallyFinal.pptx" being emailed back and forth in a Lynchian version control nightmare.

We're trying to go one step further with LiveLoop -- instead of bringing "save and sync" functionality to the desktop applications like SkyDrive, we bring true keystroke-by-keystroke real-time editing to Office. The first product we support is PowerPoint and we just launched two weeks ago.

You can find us at http://getliveloop.com .

I think a lot of developers ignore enterprise, and what I would call "the real world", often to their detriment. There really is a lot of room for talented developers in that area.

I think real-time collaboration within office documents would be very valuable - but it has to be really reliable.

Word and Excel are probably the key apps in my mind, rather than Powerpoint - I assume you plan these for later.

How hard to you think it will be to get this working well enough for a Big 4 to trust it?

LiveLoop, as it stands today, is really reliable in terms of data integrity -- we've been in alpha testing for months and have not lost a keystroke of data. However, because of the challenges of building this product through the COM API, we've had to make several design decisions which somewhat curtail the user experience, namely 1) some actions require explicit syncing, but the list of these actions shrinks every day, and 2) we need to momentarily steal focus at times.

PowerPoint is definitely the most important application from a collaboration perspective -- although Excel spreadsheets are important, they tend to be owned by a fewer number of people, often just an individual. PowerPoints often reflect consensus decisions, which require much more collaboration across multiple organizational layers. We'll be doing Word and Excel of course, but right now our focus is on PowerPoint.

I'm not sure what you mean by Big 4 (consulting?) but we are currently in a pilot at a Fortune 100 company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_(audit_firms)

Trust me, there is a lot of scope for collaboration on Word and Excel documents in the enterprise. Excel is used a lot for tracking progress on projects where a lot of people are involved. Most reports are in Word, and people are often stuck trying to work on the same document at the same time a day before it's due.

I don't disagree :) It's just that we had to start somewhere, and we decided to start with PowerPoint. Part of that decision was also that Word and PowerPoint have some architectural similarities so we wanted to start with one of those two.

Well, good luck to you. There's certainly a need in the area, and the technology that you build should be applicable to a number of useful applications.

Not only does it have to be really reliable, you have to convince businesses to buy it. I suspect that impacts the enterprise-ignoring significantly more than a lack of desire to make something. I.e., a lot of enterprises ignore developments in "the real world", often to their detriment.

The ability to upload an Excel file, edit it on the web editor or the app on my phone, and still have the original xlsx file with full fidelity available through Skydrive is fantastic. I was never a fan of the Google Docs integration on my old Evo running 2.3—it seemed terribly slow to load the docs list and individual documents, even on wifi—but have been very happy with Skydrive and its integration into WP and also Mac OS X and Windows.

I've been using SkyDrive for a couple of years. It's great. I use it to sync my desktop, laptop and phone (lumia). The main powerful thing for me is OneNote which just works transparently.

There is literally nothing out there as good. I've tried everything. Google drive is Just crap - it doesn't leave real files on your disk and its buggy. Dropbox is better but has no application support.

I think why no one has noticed is that a) the SkyDrive proponents as per much of the userbase isn't that vocal and b) everyone is blind to Microsoft these days.

As for the risk if account shutdown and them peeking at stuff, this is a risk for any 'cloud provider'. If its a problem, keep a backup (which SkyDrive does as it mirrors everything rather than providing links) and don't use it for anything dodgy. I've had 9gb of mp3s up there for two years with no problems.

I tried, it, really really liked it. LOVED the cheap prices for larger capacities, and was about to give them my money to share stuff with other people...

Until I discovered the hard way that files shared across accounts CANNOT be synchronized to the local hard drive... It was a "What the fuck???" moment, surely MS cannot roll out without this critical functionality... Yet, it's correct, you can only sync to the local hard drive stuff that belongs to your account. If it's shared from someone else's account then you can only see the files online and need to download them if you need it locally.

Big fail, and a showstopper for me. Dropbox does this just fine, BTW. so I am reluctant Dropbox user.

I actually spoke to a SkyDrive team member about this one. The root problem is that once you have a truly shared folder, it takes up both people's quota (it has to, otherwise you could link a lot of free accounts to get extra space). The way it is implemented now makes it an explicit operation to move something to your skydrive, so you know the quota implications up-front. That said, they are trying to figure out a better solution for this.

Ironically (or not), this is the reason I quit Dropbox, because they do not warn you that a shared folder will ruin your quota. Someone shared 50GB of photos, it started syncing, maxed the quota, and resulted in some important documents never making it to the cloud.

Neither is an ideal solution. Nobody's solved this problem yet.

Edit: The other reason was security; auto-sync is an excellent vector for malware to enter the system. Get into one person's skydrive, infect their shared folders, rinse and repeat.

Very true, all your points. But the need is still there.

And I hear you about the quota problem. They should just make it take up the quota of the person doing the sharing... Or am I missing something? But in the meantime I am using Dropbox and I really, really did not want to become a Dropboxer.

You are missing something.

A person could conceivably create a ton of free accounts then fill them to the free space limitations. Share it with their primary account and then they have unlimited free space.

Make it only work on paid accounts. Problem solved.

The current situation sucks.

^^^^ this

They've said only 2% of accounts are paid.

Sharing is a cornerstone of what DropBox is.

Restrict sharing to only the 2%?

No, make sharing stop double-counting for the 2%.

Re: "Dropbox, because they do not warn you that a shared folder will ruin your quota. Someone shared 50GB of photos, it started syncing, maxed the quota, and resulted in some important documents never making it to the cloud."

Yeah, Dropbox rolled out "Dropbox for teams" - not perfect. I think Pay Users should only be charged once for files shared among people - Dropbox only has one copy of it.

DropboxForTeams: "If everyone invited to the shared folder is on the same Dropbox for Teams account, the size of the shared folder will be counted against the Team's shared quota once."

I can give one example of shared folder madness. When Palm announced new WebOS SDK beta 2.5 years ago, they distributed the sdk via dropbox shared folder among the beta users. The sdk was whooping 500+ MB of size(Linux, Windows, OSX installers were added). Among those users there were some users having free 2GB account. As sdk size were added to their quota, some of them regularly deleted the sdk folder to save space. As the folder was shared, it was also removed for other beta users. Palm regularly had to regularly had to add the folder again. Hilarity ensued :) They even had to put some dummy text file naming "PLEASE DON'T DELETE THESE FILES'.

Um, perhaps because they're a little overly strict on what you can keep in there.

This photographer got his account banned and deleted after they found 4 partial nudes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/07/19/is-microsof...

Which apparently is against it's long list of prohibited uses listed here:

http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...

Nice. In particular, given that every email ever "could be considered 'junk mail'", Hotmail now forbids the transmission of email.

I am also using skydrive for few years now. All I can say that I am very happy. I keep my active codebase folder synced with skydrive and I am worry free from any loss. All my new code changes gets saved into cloud as soon as I hit "Save".

Recently, MS released a skydrive explorer and drop-off folder which makes it more good. It crashes one in a while but not a big deal. It is stuck with one of my login.aspx.vb and never sync it. I don't know why.

It created multiple versions of my few .docx files with my machine name appended but I think MS will fix it over time.

Does the success of skydrive means slow death for dropbox and box.net? I seriously think dropbox should start some other business may be integration with FB was the step in that direction but the feature is not outrageously great.

I opened my hotmail account in 98, it sure isnt going anywhere. Further I am loving skydrive. It doesn't sync on my nix boxes but it backs up via a simple drag drop. What's easier than that? I'm testing it now, but love the image gallery and simple UI.

Nicely done.

The guy you can thank for the multi-edit-streams is Pavel Curtis. I got to sit down and chat with him about the development of the calculus involved and all I can say is the guy is a genius period.

Nice, been looking for a good Docs (Drive?) replacement for a while now!

I enthusiastically tried to use SkyDrive a while back but two things stopped me: no linux client and the Mac client required Lion (while my laptop is stuck on snow leopard). For me, the whole entire point of cloud storage is that it works seamlessly across all the platforms I use. If it doesn't do that it's got little value compared to the solutions that go across all the platforms I use.

Skydrive is great! I use it on my Macbook, iPhone and Win8(desktop)! The syncing is almost seamless now, works great through all ecosystems, and it is much easier to organize your documents on the Web and on the OS! Unlike GoogleDrive, which is a mess to deal with and try to organize your documents! The sharing options are also much better with Skydrive!

Requires much hassle to use on Linux and a case-insensitive filesystem on a Mac.

Why bother?

Did you actually set up your system to use case-sensitive HFS+? What does it do that the default doesn't?

I set it up on a separate partition.

Quite frankly, I can only imagine the horrendous bug nest that would require what amounts to little more than a file syncing application to demand a case-insensitive filesystem. Do they really store the files on NTFS volumes somewhere?

It is a bizarre requirement, especially since Skydrive does preserve case.

I'd just never run into anyone with case-sensitive HFS before.

I'm not sure that it's completely bizarre. Dropbox will work on case-sensitive file systems, but it does very strange things if two files exist with the same name, but different case.

I suspect MS just didn't want to deal with this complexity for what was (perceived) to be an issue for a relatively small number of people.

To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with their reasoning, but I do see where it could have come from.

> I suspect MS just didn't want to deal with this complexity

Case-sensitive filesystems are probably much simpler than case-insensitive ones that have to preserve case when a file is saved or renamed but ignore it when the file is opened.

Because the majority of the userbase are on windows?

And by making the experience horrible to everyone else, they ensure the majority of their userbase is on Windows.

What's disappointing is that this indicates they never tested it on out-of-the-box Macs as they all come with case-sensitive filesystems by default. It says a lot about Microsoft's QA.

I could reverse that and say how horrible git and svn are on Windows for the same reason (have you ever dealt with a repo that has a file Test.cs and test.cs ?)

It's just an incompatibility you have to live with.

If you think Git or Subversion are broken, you're free to fix them and publish a patch (or a fork). I don't see it a possibility with either NTFS or SkyDrive.

And, BTW, I don't think either Git or Subversion would refuse to function on case-insensitive filesystems as does SkyDrive.

Finally, the suffering Windows programmers can impose on themselves by using version control systems does not invalidate the claim Microsoft obviously doesn't test their software on Macs with default OSX installs.

I didn't suggest they were broken. The semantics are different between UNIX and Windows which is the same point you are making. The issue here is when something decided that proceeding was dangerous and stops it.

The issue here is that compared to SVN/Git, which fail late, SkyDrive fails early and refuses to function which has a number of advantages including no nasty surprises when some awkward individual uploads Test.cs and test.cs after using it for 6 months.

They did test it and decided that it was better to fail up front rather than lead the user down a path to certain destruction.

That's the difference between good code and shit code.

As a footnote, NTFS is case sensitive via the POSIX subsystem but not via DOS VM/Win32 subsystems. HFS+ is both case sensitive and not as well. Interesting eh? No technical superiority either way.

Now, regarding patching or forking Git or Subversion, I don't want to any more. I have sent a few patches to the SVN to fix merging bugs to no avail (they are still there and regularly fuck up our mergeinfo properties). Forking is just a waste of time as we have to fork the entire dependency chain up to the end software which is pretty much up to TeamCity and VisualSVN.

As for NTFS, we had an issue with mounting junctions on volumes greater than 2TiB back in 2004. It took one phone call and 4 days to get a hotfix to us from the NTFS team and it was included in a patch cycle a few weeks later. Same with NHibernate profiler - fix in 2 hours.

Commercial software is not the root of all evil. Shitty management is and that exists both in open source and commercial markets.

I've been looking for a rich text editor for linux - I got sick of OpenOffice's load times (47sec) and seeing Oracle's logo.

It was inconceivable to me that MS has a webapp version of Word. Unfortunately, it takes 27sec to load a document (in chrome, slower in firefox).

Abiword takes only 7sec (though the rendering is bit buggy sometimes, and it doesn't selects words when you x2 click).

Odd it loads in 2 seconds for me even on ie9.

Sounds cool but -and I know I'm biased- I won't let anything pull me back into an Office world.

i wouldnt say its great, its on the middle of the pack, there are things that still drag it down, there is a limit on the size of each file and number of files you can sync, also the software runs pretty slow and syncs pretty slow, its pretty stable on windows 7 but it kinda freaks out a lot on OSX and finally they actively scan the contents of your files in the cloud, and that is kinda were i draw the line, one thing is fully encripted drive, another is what dropbox does a sort of mix of security and ease, but microsoft goes out of its way to go through your files, thats a big brother nono, on the flip side, they do have realy cheap storage (i think google drive storage is ridiculous, especially comparing with dropbox) and their office/picture application support is probably the best, so i wouldnt say skydrive is all that great, its just ok.

One more thing: Skydrive is not blocked by GFW. On the other hand, both Google and Dropbox are blocked.

GFW == Great Firewall of China, probably.

Oh, I noticed, allright! And here's why you SHOULD NOT use it!

http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...

While I would like to try it, I'm put off by Microsoft's snooping of data: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4265086

" * Windows Phone

* iPhone and iPad

* Other Phones"

Heh.

Yea, that's it. It's OUR fault (the technology users) that Microsoft is failing with SkyDrive. If only we abandoned all the other services that do us well and switch to something we don't a)know about and b)don't give a shit about then everything for MS will be fine.

Who are these people writing this crap?

also, they'll be peeking at your private stuff and banning you for it

http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...

Don't be a law breaking jagaloon and you should be fine.

Edit: My take: just because a folder is private doesn't mean you couldn't suddenly make it "public", making Microsoft the proud host of illicit pornography. I say illicit because I'm sure there are, depending on the state, laws to abide by which you must have a "18+" warning/prompt in order to access it.

Edit 2: And, if you really don't want to MSFT to see your files, but still want to use their free service, use a TrueCrypt drive. You will lose the features things like opening documents on devices, etc, but you get the additional protection.

Since when are nude photos stored on a personal storage service breaking the law?

Edited my original message.

Maybe MSFT should allow to flag your content as mature, but who knows what other jurisdictions they run under.

Welcome to the cloud, where your personal data is no longer personal.

Microsoft may have made a mistake doing this, it may look like a relatively small issue but they have taken on the burden of being responsible for the data stored on their systems now.

> Don't be a law breaking jagaloon and you should be fine.

Yeah. That makes it perfectly fine for them to peek into your files, watch your home movies...

Exactly. Like Google peeping into your inbox.

The expectation of privacy on anything you put online is a false one.

It's also foolish to expect a crime free society, but that doesn't excuse the robber.

It does not indeed, but one is wise to not get pissed off when privacy is breached. It's fighting the current, and hopeless.

Much wiser is to not upload anything anywhere that you would not like to see posted publicly or read by someone; or at least strongly encrypt stuff and deal with the inconveniences that it brings.

My point is not that privacy breaches are excusable, rather that they will happen eventually, even if privacy was promised/assumed/implied.

Hyperbole much? They seem to be using a automated scanning program to flag content. Didn't Google do something similar that became a big issue on HN?

Not hyperbole. There's a legal concept in the USA of "common carrier", holding an agent transferring information not accountable for the information transferred. As in: Verizon is not a culpable party if you use their cellular network to arrange a capital (or other) crime.

By stating content limitations in the EULA, and by actively searching for violations, MS is now legally culpable for content which is in criminal violation of the law.

Whether they are prosecuted may be a different story, but the legal culpability remains.

My mother taught me at a young age that "they did it too" is not a valid excuse.

> They seem to be using a automated scanning program to flag content.

And when the content gets flagged, what do you think happens next? Don't you think that, at some level, there will be a human involved?

Yes, it's not the flagging that bothers me. An inability to upload certain files the computer doesn't like is annoying at best. But the chance that they will go around humanly inspecting my files based on that? Dealbreaker.

Can you cite a source regarding the human involvement? I don't recall ever hearing about that. All the previous stories just indicated that the account shutdown was due to an automated scan.

So you want to use a free service where the facilitating corporation has an obligation to uphold to the standards outlined in their terms of service...without actually looking at it? Are they suppose to guess what's stored?

I mean, I get it, you don't want strangers at an evil corporation looking through your stuff...then don't store it there then complain about it when you get caught...or complain that they shouldn't be looking through your stuff.

How about certified law-abiding ... and still not fine?

SkyDrive EULA: You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, distribute or facilitate distribution of any content (including text, images, ...) or otherwise use the service in a way that: ... facilitates the purchase and sale of ... firearms.

Like many law-abiding Americans, I'm a federally licensed "cuiro and relic" firearms collector. I have a formal certificate stating my FFL number and other relevant information, acquired after undergoing a criminal background check (FBI records, fingerprints, citizenship docs, etc.); if anything amounts to a "certified law-abiding citizen" proof, this is it.

To make a purchase under this license, I must supply the seller with a copy of the license; this copy may be electronic, so it's natural I place a copy in my "cloud drive" for convenience. So I fire up SkyDrive to upload and...

...checking the EULA, realize that not only am I not allowed to upload this federally issued license in full compliance with national and state laws for the sole purpose of engaging in common lawful (even protected) activities, not only may Microsoft check my stored files for such a violation, upon discovery MS can, and I presume will in full accordance with further EULA wording, delete all my files, close the account, terminate all other MS licenses I use (my very desktop OS included), and refuse to deal with me at all ever again.

Wait, what? I'm as far from a "law breaking jagaloon" as can be right down to the 3-year-renewal background-checked license, yet it's not "fine".

Does anyone know of any stories of Google engaging in this kind of content inspection on Drive? I haven't heard any.

Pretty interesting that Microsofts competitive FUD is that Google is reading your email when it appears that they are doing similar here.

the "nothing to hide" argument: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

"Edit: My take: just because a folder is private doesn't mean you couldn't suddenly make it "public", making Microsoft the proud host of illicit pornography. I say illicit because I'm sure there are, depending on the state, laws to abide by which you must have a "18+" warning/prompt in order to access it."

Wouldn't the Safe Harbor provisions that cover online forums and the such negate the need for that worry?

(Sidenote: I want to down vote you since the "don't break the law and you don't have to worry" is such a flawed line of thinking but at the same time I want to up vote you for introducing me to the word "jagaloon".)

The problem with this is that I'd like to use the service at work, but if people are inspecting the content, we probably can't use it since the drive would contain proprietary information.

>making a private folder public

They have just as much opportunity to scan it when the folder is declared public as they would if you directly uploaded to the public folder. There is no reason to scan the private folder.

Exactly, I still remember that story. Certainly a big red flag for majority of potential users, myself included.

I really like the Skydrive interface and user experience but that content inspection they do is pretty much a show stopper. I wouldn't have anything that would get me flagged, but it's the principle of it and the "slippery slope" aspect.

Sometimes MS can take a step forward in innovation but still not stop itself from taking two more back, it's almost like a sick compulsion for their decision makers.

I have a very extensive torrent file collection on my SkyDrive (well over a thousand torrents), and have had it on there for a long time (before SkyDrive existed, when i was only using Live Sync). 99% of that collection are torrents to copyrighted works. Some from Pirate Bay, some from Private trackers.

I also have a few folders of 'Funny' images, some of which can certainly be classified as tasteless, extremely graphic pornography (what can i say, i have sick sense of humor).

Nothing is shared with anyone, and i access it daily from the SkyDrive App on my Windows Phone, and from my Netbook via the web from a million different places all over the state, country, and a few countries in Europe.

Never had it taken down. Not a peep from anyone.

The nightmare scenario is a database of checksums on Microsoft's servers which is continually referenced once your files land on the server. But i doubt it, maybe naively.

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