Google Drive • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Drive

#121

Post by tjmc » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:46 AM UTC

sirwanqutbi wrote: post #71

Why is Google immune to Anti-competition laws?

Anti-competition laws (in the US at least) only take effect where a company 1. has a monopoly or near-monopoly in a market and then 2. abuses that position to keep out or disadvantage competitors.

The laws don't apply to Google here because there's significant competition (SkyDrive, iCloud, Dropbox and others) so no monopoly. And Google is also fine in markets like search where they are the dominant player unless they start doing dumb things like penalising companies for advertising on other search engines.

Re: Google Drive

#122

Post by tomkarlo » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:01 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #118

tomkarlo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why would you trust Dropbox or another small provider any more/less than Microsoft, Apple or Google? If say, Microsoft bought Dropbox, would you then no longer trust them? Interested in the reasoning here.

First, since cloud storage is the only reason Dropbox exists as a company I think they'll try harder to do it right. If Google Drive doesn't live up to Google's expectations they'll shut it down like they've shut down all of their other unsuccessful projects. Second, possibly related to the first point, it seems the other companies are doing cloud storage to sell their other products. SkyDrive ties in with Office Liv…

Given that Google's charging for Drive and not G+, it kind of seems like the other way around.

There's always a risk a company will either shut down a business (Symbian, Wave, MySpace, Delicious), or go out of business (Chumby), or get bought and have their business shutdown (Sidekick, Drop.io). I don't think you can really know the future enough to make product choices based on the chance that will happen.

Re: Google Drive

#123

Post by nfm » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:06 AM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #87

zavulon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those are nice commandments. But most Google users aren't nearly tech savvy to follow them.

The existence of this new product does not make users more or less tech savvy. If a user goes from 1 copy (hard drive), to 2 copies, then it's a net gain for their backups. If a user goes from 2 copies (hard drive, some backup system), to 2 copies (hard drive, Google drive), then yes, arguably, it's a net loss for their backups, because they can simultaneously have a HD failure and get locked out of their Google acco…

I don't like being pedantic, but a sync'ed copy isn't a backup. It might protect against hardware failure, but it won't help against accidental deletion or corruption.

I'm not sure if GDrive has file versioning/restoration built into it or not, but there is an important distinction to be made here.

Re: Google Drive

#124

Post by ajross » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:21 AM UTC

zavulon wrote: post #82

VikingCoder wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole point of this to synch your files to your local computer?

The point is to sync so if your local computer fails you can retrieve them. A situation could occur where your hard drive fails AND you're locked out of your Google Drive account.

Yes, but that's a two point failure. You don't engineer for two point failures until you're absolutely sure that you've covered all the single point failure cases, which basically means never.

Re: Google Drive

#125

Post by rscale » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 6:16 AM UTC

Duff wrote: post #10

diminish wrote: post #6

microsoft, canonical, apple and now google; won't any one of the bigger tech players buy dropbox instead of developing something new?

The asking price is probably too insane. If Instagram is a $1B company, than what is Dropbox?

Dropbox raised $250m at a (rumored) $4b valuation not long ago.

Re: Google Drive

#126

Post by jxi » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 7:50 AM UTC

zavulon wrote: post #69

With Google's legendary customer service, it's only a matter of time until someone gets their account locked, loses all their files and can't get them from Google because there's no way to speak an actual person.

Has anyone actually gotta their gmail account locked for a non-malicious reason? I can understand your AdSense account or G+ account locked because those have some various more strict rules, but I've never heard of anyone getting their gmail/calendar/docs account locked.

Their automated recovery systems are good enough such that you don't need an actual person. It nags you all the time to enter a phone number and recovery email, and reminds you of the recovery email from time to time.

Re: Google Drive

#127

Post by jxi » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 7:52 AM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #105

ceejayoz wrote: post #11

The Google Docs integration is disappointing. Just JSON files that open up Google Docs in your browser, nothing useful to point Time Machine or some sort of backup script at.

I was disappointed too. It's a glorified bookmark manager. I'd have thought it would at least give me csv and rtf locally or an XML format.

There is an option to enable accessing your files offline.

Re: Google Drive

#128

Post by jxi » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 7:54 AM UTC

rkudeshi wrote: post #50

dkrich wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree and I have no affiliation with Dropbox or have any vested interest in their success. I just tend to think that the optimal cloud solution is as close to invisible as possible while letting people use whichever software tools they need. I don't really see any single entity owning the software and the storage because no single entity can own the collaboration tools. I view collaboration and syncing as two di…

I think you just nailed something exactly on the head that I've had a hard time describing to people. For me, the fundamental problem with a service like Google Docs is that it is the ONLY way I can edit a document. Whereas on my computer, I can open a .doc file (synced with Dropbox) in Word, TextEdit, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, or just about any other document editor. Doubly so for more platform-agnostic files (e.g. txt…

I hate the fact that you can open .doc files with many editors. When sending them around, there's always someone who opens and edits an OpenOffice file in Word or vice-versa which ends up messing up the file in some subtle and unfixable way. Having a single (extensible) editor is definitely the way to go.

Re: Google Drive

#129

Post by carey » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 8:49 AM UTC

nfm wrote: post #123

VikingCoder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of this new product does not make users more or less tech savvy. If a user goes from 1 copy (hard drive), to 2 copies, then it's a net gain for their backups. If a user goes from 2 copies (hard drive, some backup system), to 2 copies (hard drive, Google drive), then yes, arguably, it's a net loss for their backups, because they can simultaneously have a HD failure and get locked out of their Google acco…

I don't like being pedantic, but a sync'ed copy isn't a backup. It might protect against hardware failure, but it won't help against accidental deletion or corruption. I'm not sure if GDrive has file versioning/restoration built into it or not, but there is an important distinction to be made here.

https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans... notes that old versions are saved for 30 days or 100 revisions, which does provide some protection.

Re: Google Drive

#130

Post by ramblerman » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 9:09 AM UTC

I wonder what this will mean for dropbox. I certainly like the micro-like pricing starting at 2.50 a month.

As a statisfied dropbox user, with only ~200mb used, I don't need to pay for the service. Yet I recently wanted to show my support by taking their lowest possible plan. (I thought this would put me back 15-30 dollars a year).

Yet the lowest thing they offer is 9.99 a month. I found that suprising