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Disable Google Drive drive letter

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Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#71

Post by kethinov »

bushbaba wrote: post #66
pedro2 wrote: post #14

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream. Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen. An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: th…

This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring. And Drive is one of their enterprise products.

Ditto. The sudden inability to mount Google Drive to a folder instead of a separate volume in macOS finally got me to get off my ass and migrate to a self-hosted Nextcloud, something which honestly was pretty far down on my to-do list, so if Google hadn't made Google Drive so much more unusable out of nowhere then they could have continued harvesting data from me for who knows how much longer. They had to put in effort to lose me as a customer.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#72

Post by pessimizer »

kettleballroll wrote: post #40
nixass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, we're talking about Google here Exactly the point the referred poster was making. Google does nothing without monetization in mind

As opposed to which other company?

What difference does that make? This is an observation about Google's motives, not an argument that they're the only company who has those motives.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#73

Post by ecf »

kethinov wrote: post #71
bushbaba wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring. And Drive is one of their enterprise products.

Ditto. The sudden inability to mount Google Drive to a folder instead of a separate volume in macOS finally got me to get off my ass and migrate to a self-hosted Nextcloud, something which honestly was pretty far down on my to-do list, so if Google hadn't made Google Drive so much more unusable out of nowhere then they could have continued harvesting data from me for who knows how much longer. They had to put in effo…

You won’t regret setting it up. I was hesitant at first as well but three years later with zero-downtime and 100% auto-update success I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 30 minutes administering it.

Currently have it running on DO with daily droplet snapshots and it’s a nice reassurance that wherever happens, I can get back to a working state and never lose any data.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#74

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

zomglings wrote: post #61
deepsun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promotions.

I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with litt…

Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#75

Post by b112 »

b112 wrote: post #44
danielheath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be much less painful to just have users get used to the new behavior than to support a setting for forever. Painful for who?

Users are the product... Do you care what gold thinks, as you mine it? No, you only care about raw cost. And if you lose some gold, but in the end save money, who cares? Which makes one wonder, should OSS vs profit driven, think of such things the same way?

Ah-ha! Downvoted! The man, in combination with reverse vampires, is afraid of the truth being spoken.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#76

Post by ljm »

nixass wrote: post #39
ljm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going with Occam's Razor, I think it's really just as simple as product/engineering not making this kind of feature a priority. Plus, we're talking about Google here, so this new desktop version was 99% likely to have been rebuilt as an MVP.

> Plus, we're talking about Google here Exactly the point the referred poster was making. Google does nothing without monetization in mind

It's fairly well documented that many projects in Google happen because that's pretty much the only way to move up the career ladder, and once the promotions have been doled out then the project loses its original stewardship...until someone else is looking for a promotion and sets their eyes on rebuilding that project. (Case in point, the numerous failed attempts to deliver or even brand/market a messaging app).

Naturally, as is it is these days, any new product or redesign is conceived in terms of an MVP. You could argue that the industry as a whole has taken this concept far too literally over the last decade, to the point of being cultish about it.

I don't dispute the parent poster's point in general, I just think it's more indifferent than lazy/greedy/arrogant, unless it comes to search or ads. That's arguably worse, but Google's reputation for delivering increasingly mediocre versions of its products (or shitcanning them entirely) does precede it.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#78

Post by janto »

kettleballroll wrote: post #40
nixass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, we're talking about Google here Exactly the point the referred poster was making. Google does nothing without monetization in mind

As opposed to which other company?

Maybe: as opposed to companies that exclusively rely on income from happy users of their software. As long as users are locked into Google's platform it doesn't matter to their bottom line if an individual product is at best "good enough". Google can make money out of the user's engagement in other ways.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#79

Post by vagrantJin »

chupasaurus wrote: post #70
vagrantJin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this doesn't help on Windows Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.

NTFS/ReFS support symlinks if that's what you meant.

> NTFS/ReFS support symlinks

That's a better description actually. Windows 10 is too vague.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#80

Post by zomglings »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #74
zomglings wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with litt…

Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because…

I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google.

For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon.

The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development.

Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.

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