321–330 of 413 posts
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Well, that's not surprising given that it was never a documented feature to begin with, to my knowledge.
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/75509
This is quite tempting, but the Google Drive client is just too terrible. I've never once had a single problem with the Dropbox client. Ever.
Except for all of the security problems DropBox has had over the years, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How can anyone give license of their personal stuff to third party? How could they possibly operate a service that has as one of its primary features sharing and copying of your content, if you didn't give them a license to do that? This is standard boilerplate for just about any service that accepts user generated content for just about any reason.
If this is the standard boilerplate, then standard needs to be changed :). Why a "pure" storage service needs to do following? 1. "reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content." 2. Why they should have…
However, I fully agree with you about the suspicious point 2.
I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…
I'm more concerned with whether their software is any good. I tried it a while ago and it didn't even come to close to dropbox even in terms of syncing, let alone the other things that dropbox has done.
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Google has a history of shutting even profitable projects. Dropbox doesn't. There is a legitimate reason to be wary of relying on anything Google.
It's Google and it's just a place to put data. Google won't lose your data. If they shutter, you'll have 2 years to move that data to ACME Drive. Just to be absolutely clear... you'll have 2 years to drag and drop a folder to another location.
It nags me that even at this great price I'm not jumping up and down to switch from Dropbox. Why is this? -- Once you start using Dropbox there are some serious network effects. It takes a lot of work to get all your friends (both work and personal) to move. -- Even though Google Drive is so much cheaper it just doesn't seem to have the usability of Dropbox. I find the web interface really hard to use for some reason…
For a while, I had Google Drive and Dropbox. That was when Gdrive was $5 for 100GB, and that price couldn't make me switch. Seriously, Gdrive does not measure up to Dropbox. The Dropbox client is so, SO much lighter on system resources than the Gdrive client, it's stupid. I've had Gdrive end up sitting on 300+Mb of data while Dropbox happily ran with 50Mb. As well, Google Drive has exactly one mode: on. There is next…
I happily pay for both Box AND Dropbox and this does not in the least entice me. Google made a social contract with the world. It was a bad marketing move to break the contract. Again and again. You'd have to be a fool to trust your data with them today. Because they sell your information let alone that they drop services like this when they get bored. Not sure if anyone thought of this, but some of their products co…
> For example, offer people internally to take over Reader, spin it off and let it find a business model. Reader was implemented on top of Google's huge internal infrastructure. "Spinning it off" would be equivalent to re-writing it from scratch. > At least it would have felt like they tried to honor their social contract. I can't fathom the sense of entitlement in this sentence. Maybe I'm biased because I'm a Google…
Google sold geeks the world over on a different kind of company. A "Don't Be Evil" company. A company we could trust with our personal email. That supported the open source community. But it was a big bait and switch. I never got over the betrayal. That's what I mean by social contract.
Google today is very different.
Sure, we got gmail for "free". Google made a TON of money off that "free" offer BTW. And like many others, I built a dependency on this email system. Countless services and people know me on that email address. I'd LOVE to get rid of it because I no longer trust Google, but it's challenging as hell. That's why dependency on the wrong company is, dare I say it, evil.
A quote from the "Don't be evil" entry on Wikipedia:
"Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."
While there are a lot of great things about Google, there are a lot of shitty things too. Back in the day it was important to make the ads unobtrusive. To separate out ads from organic results. Now on a commercial product SERP you have to page down to get to the first organic result! I mean, the list of issues goes on and on.
You ask:
"What were the terms of this contract? What did the users offer in return?"
Ummm...Google has a gazillion dollars. I think the users offered plenty in return for believing in Google. -- I remember the excitement of RSS. And how wonderful Reader was. The "gift" of Google's "free" Reader has turned into a massive NEGATIVE for the open source community and those who loved RSS. With "friends" like these bearing "gifts", who needs enemies? This has been discussed ad infinitum, so I'll leave it at that.
But it's in this context that I think you'd be nuts to trust Google with a Dropbox clone.
RE: infrastructure, fair enough.
Final note, knowing quite a few Googlers and Xooglers, the engineers are better individually than what the company has turned into. Since the IPO, things have never been the same.
I happily pay for both Box AND Dropbox and this does not in the least entice me. Google made a social contract with the world. It was a bad marketing move to break the contract. Again and again. You'd have to be a fool to trust your data with them today. Because they sell your information let alone that they drop services like this when they get bored. Not sure if anyone thought of this, but some of their products co…
I'm not sure those you refer to as Google breaking a "social contract" with would be better off with a sorta-Google-sorta-startup-reader. It seems like Reader shutting down was great for the startup ecosystem, and they made it really easy for that to happen. I don't know of a compelling argument to choose Reader over that.
I mean, just speaking in terms of a business move, Google's track record ain't great with these types of services. There must be a better way than dumping them like that.
What I heard or read somewhere about Reader is that they couldn't find internal champions, and that's why it died. NOT because it was losing money.
Then again, Google+ is a better business for them than RSS.
I happily pay for both Box AND Dropbox and this does not in the least entice me. Google made a social contract with the world. It was a bad marketing move to break the contract. Again and again. You'd have to be a fool to trust your data with them today. Because they sell your information let alone that they drop services like this when they get bored. Not sure if anyone thought of this, but some of their products co…