Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the PDFs online and offline.

I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux there even isn't an official client.

Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files that you shared and unsharing from there.

I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is seamless.

That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.

Certainly. Google has plenty of customers signed up for Google Accounts so users use Google Docs for doc sharing, which eventually means running Box.com inside Google, offering GDrive. Which reminds of Google Wave as various technology used in Wave was eventually used in other Google products, most notably in Google Doc (although Google Doc was a production acquisition).

Maybe 'dead' for personal usage however as part of Google Apps it is a no brainer and integrates nicely with the whole of the Apps suite. I am prepared to eat my words however I would be extremely surprised if Google kill off Drive for Apps.

I am in the process of migrating our organisation's various systems into one Google Apps domain.

In my experience Drive's usefulness is far greater when use Drive for both Docs and file storage rather than for file storage alone.

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