I'd hardly trust Google again for a service I'd have to rely on in the future. Let alone for a service that doesn't force Google+ down your throat today or tomorrow. Sorry, but Google Reader, Hangouts and Android have been too much already.
If this same product was released by a company you had never heard of, would you use it? Would you honestly believe it to have a greater chance of survival?
My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
Sorry, you must understand that there are now enough people out there who have been on the receiving end of Google's careless approach to their end-users (note, I intentionally did not refer to us as customers).
Announcements like this used to excite me. Not anymore. I hope one day things will be different.
[Edit: downvoted as expected. Feel free. Just come back and upvote when it's your turn to get on the Google support rollercoaster].
Amazon has my loyalty for the very specific reason that they don't release half-assed products and then pull them even when they have millions of users.
rsync.net has been around since 2001 and, if you care about openness and interoperability[1], is an even better place for "anything you want to stick around".
Yes, more expensive, but the "HN readers discount" for new customers is currently 8 cents (vs. S3 @ 3 cents). Email us.
[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
>My suggestion is to simply judge this product on its merits, and accept that nothing is guaranteed, whether it's made by Google or not.
Maybe RMS was right and the answer is to stop using cloud services?
I'm afraid there are more factors than this at play. Reader was both popular, and it produced value (to me and many others). I was never even given the option to pay for it. For whatever reason, Reader didn't fit Google's strategic vision... so it got axed.
Yep, just what I want to hear when I'm uploading my 1000s of photos to that product...
People have a common tendency to extrapolate from low-N or even single events to produce an inaccurate picture of future possibilities. I'm quite happy with GMail, Drive, Android and so on, and don't expect them to vanish any time soon.
I'm still using GMail and Android, but I'm not happy with how their UI change, and with how the latter puts Google everywhere (it's a bit better with Cyanogen, but still).
Maybe I'm extrapolating, maybe not. The only thing I'm sure of, is that when trust has been lost, it's very hard to get it back.
You don't trust them to keep the Photos service operational in the future? But if the worst comes to the worst, in this theoretical scenario, at least they would surely provide you a way to transfer your files first. So why does it bother you so much?
Or you don't trust them to keep Photos independent of Google+? Surely they would never say "from now on you can't access your photos unless you sign up for Google+". Photos are very personal and important to people. This would cause an unprecedented outrage.
I trust them even less to not put Google+ inside this, which for me is more or less the same thing as shutting the service down, since I really don't want to use Google+ (I mean, really), and I don't want people I share photos with to be forced to use it (I mean, really). You seem to be sure they wouldn't do this, I think the exact opposite. Well, future will tell us.
Now, you're right in that they have a excellent history of allowing their users to get their files back. This is something I definitely trust them and thank them for a million times. Now, a photo service isn't relevant without a sharing feature, and if the service is shutting down, no backup that I can think of backs the sharing up.
Why do people harp on this for Google? /SMH
And as for "really don't want to use Google+", that's very much like saying "I really don't want to log in to Hacker News."
Yes. You have an account at Google that enables social interaction. That's all it is. Why people imbue it with some awful emotional connotations is really beyond me. It's a tool that has multiple uses, some of which you don't want to use... Got it. But some of which you might want to use.