Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service(online.wsj.com)
online.wsj.com
Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204369404577211961645711988-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html
14 comments
Can you imagine something going wrong with your account and trying to contact Google support?
I trust Dropbox way more than Google. They know what customer service means. Google can't even spell it. They are too proud and addicted to their power.
I trust Dropbox way more than Google. They know what customer service means. Google can't even spell it. They are too proud and addicted to their power.
"I trust Dropbox way more than Google."
I'd be worried about Google doing the wrong thing correctly and Dropbox doing the right thing incorrectly.
Given that, I'm not sure who I would actually trust more.
I'd be worried about Google doing the wrong thing correctly and Dropbox doing the right thing incorrectly.
Given that, I'm not sure who I would actually trust more.
In four years, I've had exactly one issue with Dropbox, which got sorted out quickly through their excellent support staff.
I've had loads of issues with Google and continue to, even as a paying Apps customer. Not one has ever got resolved in my favour. It's like talking to a wall.
"Don't grow too big" is an insufficient but absolutely necessary condition for "Don't be evil".
I hope Dropbox doesn't grow too big.
I've had loads of issues with Google and continue to, even as a paying Apps customer. Not one has ever got resolved in my favour. It's like talking to a wall.
"Don't grow too big" is an insufficient but absolutely necessary condition for "Don't be evil".
I hope Dropbox doesn't grow too big.
You have had loads of issues with google? What's up?
I've had a site banned from Google Adwords for no obvious reason. No questions asked or answered.
My developer account and apps randomly disappeared from the Chrome Web Store. Even after providing a receipt of the verification payment, they said sorry I have to pay again. It was only $5, so I just did that, not a big deal but it took them weeks to tell me that and I lost lots of users in the time. If $5 means nothing to me, what does it mean to a billion dollar corporation?
And managing app accounts is a joke. I still keep getting errors while trying to log into various services. Do I want to contact Google support to sort it out? Hell no.
My developer account and apps randomly disappeared from the Chrome Web Store. Even after providing a receipt of the verification payment, they said sorry I have to pay again. It was only $5, so I just did that, not a big deal but it took them weeks to tell me that and I lost lots of users in the time. If $5 means nothing to me, what does it mean to a billion dollar corporation?
And managing app accounts is a joke. I still keep getting errors while trying to log into various services. Do I want to contact Google support to sort it out? Hell no.
> Do I want to contact Google support to sort it out? Hell no.
If you will not contact them to sort things out how can you complain? You contacted dropbox...
If you will not contact them to sort things out how can you complain? You contacted dropbox...
I guess you didn't bother reading about the two instances I mentioned where communication with them was either impossible or painfully slow and useless.
If blindly defending the corporation is what sails your boat, bon voyage!
If blindly defending the corporation is what sails your boat, bon voyage!
I'd like the Google Drive to back-up my Android apps, images, videos, settings, Contacts, passwords and other data, so when I change phones or install a custom ROM, I can restore my phone 100%. They already do this with Chrome. I'd like to be able to do the same with Android.
wait. Doesn't android already do those things?
Only some of them, not all.
Which ones are you missing? Google backs up all of the things you mentioned for me on my phone.
Doesn't backup my files on my SD card and sync with my other devices (Macbook, etc) like Dropbox does.
so you want iCloud for Android?
Dropbox is a terrific product. Simple for absolutely anyone to use, it does one thing and does it perfectly well. But I think Dropbox as a company is indeed vulnerable. They have only the one product, as perfect as it is, and no hold on their customers. If a Dropbox clone were to appear tomorrow, transferring your files is a matter of minutes if not seconds. Thus they're posed for fierce price competition, with fast-dropping profit margins. So the name of the game will be added-value services - services that would potentially "lock-in" customers and make it harder to switch. Unfortunately, Google seems better posed for such services, but I, for one, will stick with Dropbox for now, simply because I don't want to give Google access to so much of my data (it's quite enough that they keep all my e-mail).
Google has Big Table right? But do they have a distributed storage mechanism on par with S3? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System
If amazon can build it, Google can build it.
If amazon can build it, Google can build it.
But as Steve Yegge reminded us in his famous Platform rant, Amazon knows how to make it a service whereas Google will tend to be stuck thinking about it as a product.
Correction: thinking about it as a way to attract product.
Check out Google Cloud Storage. https://developers.google.com/storage/
Proudly built in Google Seattle. We are hiring, by the way. :)
Proudly built in Google Seattle. We are hiring, by the way. :)
I never understood why Google would give me 8GB of free email storage (of which I use less than 1 GB), but limits my picasa storage to 1024 MB. They need to homogenize their product lineup and just give me an amount N of storage and let me decide how I want to use that.
1) Because typical user behavior for email will require megs, not gigs. I've used apps for my business for five years running and only barely crest a gig.
2) Because Gmail's main economic contribution to Google isn't the advertising, it is in signing people up for Google accounts, just like Yahoo Mail's main purpose is to stickily draw people to the Yahoo front page. After you're logged in on Google, your rate of searching goes up, compared to otherwise demographically similar people who are not logged in. (Same if you use Chrome or the Google toolbar, by the way.) Google likes when you search because Google is a multinational advertising company and about two thirds of their inventory by revenues is on their own search result pages.
3) Separately from the totally rational reasons to prefer Gmail (a strategically important service with negligible marginal costs) over Picasa (a strategically marginal service with relatively high marginal costs), Google is also a big multinational corporation, and internal politics still happen there. There is a political angle to any project getting additional resources. Picasa is not politically favored compared to, I don't know, that I-can't-believe-its-not-Facebook that they launched recently.
2) Because Gmail's main economic contribution to Google isn't the advertising, it is in signing people up for Google accounts, just like Yahoo Mail's main purpose is to stickily draw people to the Yahoo front page. After you're logged in on Google, your rate of searching goes up, compared to otherwise demographically similar people who are not logged in. (Same if you use Chrome or the Google toolbar, by the way.) Google likes when you search because Google is a multinational advertising company and about two thirds of their inventory by revenues is on their own search result pages.
3) Separately from the totally rational reasons to prefer Gmail (a strategically important service with negligible marginal costs) over Picasa (a strategically marginal service with relatively high marginal costs), Google is also a big multinational corporation, and internal politics still happen there. There is a political angle to any project getting additional resources. Picasa is not politically favored compared to, I don't know, that I-can't-believe-its-not-Facebook that they launched recently.
Just because it's more profitable for them, doesn't make it right to users. Many people would like the flexibility of managing the extra space Google says we have in our Gmail account, so why not put people over profits for once and do what's best for users?
Google does provide you with more flexibility of storage allocation once you purchase additional storage. At that point all services share the same quota and you get full flexibility.
As such, see this split in case of unpaid accounts as another incentive for people to upgrade. As you don't pay anything, it's well within Google's right to optimize their offering to keep their costs as low as possible (ie. limiting picasa storage) and get the maximum marketing value (i.e practically unlimited mail storage).
As such, see this split in case of unpaid accounts as another incentive for people to upgrade. As you don't pay anything, it's well within Google's right to optimize their offering to keep their costs as low as possible (ie. limiting picasa storage) and get the maximum marketing value (i.e practically unlimited mail storage).
They have the right to offer anything they want, but ignoring users who want more control over their supposed Gmail space just isn't putting the user first, it's putting profits first. But I guess greed isn't evil, right?
You can complain about resource limitations on a free offering from a publicly traded company if you'd like. Or, if you'd like to be treated like an actual customer, you can become one, by paying for storage.
Oh yea, I forgot we only exist if we pull out our damn wallet in this corrupt capitalist society.
Didn't you answer your own question? They know most gmail users won't use more than 1GB so it's good for marketing to offer 8GB and financially they won't waste too much money as most people won't use those 8GB. With picasa however, that limit would probably be reached quickly by most or many so it's safer for them to offer less there.
If you pay for space upgrades then that applies to all services. I'm fairly sure the Gmail space system was related to how they stored the data, as they have the always increasing ticker. Either that or it is/was a marketing ploy.
For reference, here is the Google storage pricing: http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
Photos less than 2048x2048 in dimensions don't count towards the free limit since Google+ launched. I have always resized my photos to 1600px wide, and now my Picasa usage is very low.
I think your use case is not universal. I regularly reach 80% - 90% and so do my peers. We have to regularly use findbigmail and smart-personally-defined filters to delete big and unnecessary mails.
Gmail is used as a collaboration as well as backup tool by at least a few of us. What it means is that we often tend to many attachments exceeding 10MB - and multiple versions of them. Not the most optimal usage I know, but it is very quick and convenient most users (even the not-so-technically proficient ones) are able to use it with ease.
Gmail is used as a collaboration as well as backup tool by at least a few of us. What it means is that we often tend to many attachments exceeding 10MB - and multiple versions of them. Not the most optimal usage I know, but it is very quick and convenient most users (even the not-so-technically proficient ones) are able to use it with ease.
Google can index and search your emails in GMail, and serve you ad. The more free storage the more emails to index. Pictures are difficult to parse and index. It's less a profit center for them.
Wow! This comment prompted me to check how much of my gmail storage I am using, and it made me realize that my google account through Cornell gives me 25GB of storage. Oh how I wish I could use this 25GB as cloud storage.
http://i.imgur.com/ixlZ6.png
http://i.imgur.com/ixlZ6.png
Your anonymization process pairs ineffectiveness with labor-intensity astonishingly well.
Aside from the other reasons mentioned here, email compresses fairly well so 8GB of email could end up using less disk than 1GB of photos (which are already compressed).
Images can't really be compressed while emails easily can. That Even if you reached 8GB of text that isn't how much storage you're taking up on their servers.
In addition, if you store more than 1 GB, chances are that a good fraction of that is photos emailed to multiple people, which they can store only one copy of while counting this storage against each person that leaves it on their account.
There are other costs you need to consider such as data transfer, the usage patterns of your private inbox is different from a public album.
Is "Drive" really a good name for storage? Especially if another branch of the company is developing technology for cars and another branch is developing traffic maps and traffic reporting technology.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. This pretty much sums up why I will continue to use, and pay, for my Dropbox service for documents. I do not see how integration with Google's other services is a useful thing. They are just files. Now my photos and music, well Google already does that.
The good news is that Dropbox should integrate search soon. They will have to in order to keep up. Competition is a good thing for consumers.
The good news is that Dropbox should integrate search soon. They will have to in order to keep up. Competition is a good thing for consumers.
Store the rest of your files with the biggest ad company? If you want ads to be uncomfortably relevant to you, go ahead.
About time! I've always thought Google could surely offer ridiculously large storage limits for free. Same goes with cloud hosting.
BTW, the article mentions Dropbox raising $250 million. If I'm not mistaken, youtube had only raised about a tenth of that by the time it was acquired, and they had to stream videos, and I guess storage (and bandwidth) was more expensive back then. Does anyone know what Dropbox does with so much money?
I'd use them immediately given command line tools, and open protocols/apis.
so whats Sundar Pichai - the guy who convinced goolges top management in 2008 to kill - the ready for launch - GDrive because files are "deprecated", "ungoogly" and a "thing of the past" doing nowadays?
according to his linkedin profile http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&authType=na... you should contact him for "career opportunities"
according to his linkedin profile http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&authType=na... you should contact him for "career opportunities"
..is this a rhetorical question?
See the byline in http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-an... - Sundar Pichai is "SVP, Chrome and Apps".
See the byline in http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-an... - Sundar Pichai is "SVP, Chrome and Apps".
people familiar with the matter
This peculiar phrase appears four times in the article. Is it journalist-code for something?
This peculiar phrase appears four times in the article. Is it journalist-code for something?
Yes, it's code for a source who is "on background" or of similar attribution status. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_sourcing under "Speaking terms."
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Maybe they will allow users to use public key encryption (like mozy does). Oh wait, Google makes all of their money by reading our documents/emails and watching all of our online behavior. I'm sure this service will be no different.
If you truly have a privacy concern just throw a TrueCrypt file store inside of your cloud storage. I do this already in dropbox and it works well.
Yes, I do that for certain files in my Dropbox. But opening one of these files requires opening truecrypt, mounting the file and then opening the files inside the mounted drive. I wish that I could have this security, but be able to open an encrypted file in one-click. This could be possible if I were able set my own private key, and then the Dropbox (or Google Drive) client would encrypt all of my data as they transfer it to their servers.
The only way Google can win over competition now, is if they provide unlimited storage (remember when Gmail first launched?). Also, can they also announce the shutdown of G+ while they're at launching of a new service?
I'm not saying that Google is untrustworthy but with the way they've been acting the past few years the idea of giving them my files feels a bit creepy.
Eric Schmidt: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
Edited to add: I think it is preferable to spread information among service providers rather than concentrate it in one provider's hands. Google already has my search and email information. I do not think it advisable to add information from files to that.
Eric Schmidt: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
Edited to add: I think it is preferable to spread information among service providers rather than concentrate it in one provider's hands. Google already has my search and email information. I do not think it advisable to add information from files to that.
I'd say it's just as likely as not that they'll manage to create something worse, even with the with Dropbox as a nearly static target for 5 years.
Somehow Big Co's almost always manage to screw up even the relatively easy things.