Google Drive Launching Next Week With 5GB Free Space 265
An anonymous reader writes "The Next Web is reporting that Google Drive, the search giant's long anticipated cloud storage service, is set to launch next week. From the article: 'What's interesting though is that Google is planning to start everyone with 5 GB of storage. Of course you can buy more, but that trumps Dropbox's 2 GB that is included with every account. Dropbox does make it easy to get more space, including 23 GB of potential upgrades for HTC users. What's also interesting is the wording related to how the system will work. It's been long-thought that Windows integration will come easy, but that getting the Google Drive icon into the Mac a la Dropbox would be a bit harder. From what we're reading, Google Drive will work "in desktop folders" on both Mac and Windows machines, which still leaves the operation question unanswered.'"
Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data - I would use a professional hosting service with SLA and company that has no need to mine my data.
Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too. On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them. They already have this problem in other markets.
Re:Google Drive (Score:4, Insightful)
>> unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new.
Because email was a new phenomenon when Gmail launched?
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and for the same reasons their e-mail service never caught on.
WebDAV access? (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll have to see. If the new "GDrive" can be securely accessed via the open, standard WebDAV protocol, I'll think it's interesting and I'll be an enthusiastic adopter. If not, then it's just another cloud file locker that uses proprietary client software (or a web UI, no good for integration work), which is considerably less interesting.
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably targeting Apple's iCloud. It's nice to be able to tell developers "Here's a place to store data. It will automatically be backed up and synchronized between the user's devices. You won't have to run your own servers and get the user to trust you with their data. You won't even have to ask the user for special credentials or get them to sign up for Dropbox or anything like that. It just works."
Re:Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it doesn't seem like this is the case with Google Drive. It actually looks like they don't bring anything new or innovative to the table either, and in fact, might have a worse service than Dropbox and other companies have (not even having good software for OS X or Linux). They also don't offer that much more space either.
The cloud storage landscape and internet in 2012 is vastly different from email and Gmail when it launched.
5 GB (Score:5, Insightful)
Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?
My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?
rsync.net (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid.
The advantage of a dumb data store is that you can layer some encryption transparently. Even something simple like putting a password on a RAR file is enough to prevent such snooping.
That said, I probably wouldn't use it for anything important anyway.
Re:Google Drive (Score:4, Insightful)
Email is not storage. Users don't want a new email address. That's why hotmail and yahoo still exist at all.
Re:Privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spideroak lets you keep the keys. Truecrypt will work but does come with two big performance hits. First you have to upload the entire container the first time, after which it should just need differences sending. Unfortunately Windows doesn't allow the client software to know which parts of the file changed via notifications, just that something changed, so it has to scan the entire file. If your container is 1GB then that's scanning 1GB every time you make a change.
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Insofar as that is true, that history includes doing so with a long warning before cutting off access and with quite good support for outbound migration, so I don't see why it would be much of a rational concern. Further, the kind of cloud storage user interface being provided is a pretty trivial layer on top of the cloud storage backend that underlies many other Google services that its a pretty low risk of it being discontinued.
Neither web search engines, web-based email, or web-based video hosting were anything new when Google's search engine, Gmail, or YouTube (which wasn't Google's when it was introduced) were introduced. Nevertheless, each managed to do quite well.
Free-to-start, generous quota, and zero-effort (or close to it) signup if you already have a Google Account, by themselves, will get them some users. Actually having some interesting distinguishing features compared to other cloud storage providers would obviously be important to getting substantially more users. The most obvious opportunity I see for Google here is integration with Google Docs.
How?
Tracking slashdot may be evidence of inefficient use of resources, but its hardly an argument in support of "they know too much!" scaremongering.
Well, it might cause problems in that regard, if there was evidence that Google was illegally leveraging anything against competitors in the cloud storage space. Then again, as I discuss below, it probably wouldn't even then.
Winning in two different markets to the extent where established players in one feel that its worth their effort to complain that you are leveraging your market position in one to dominate the other is the exact opposite of a "problem" for the firm that is in that position.
It might lead to a problem if you actually were doing something that was likely to produce a signficant restraining action from some government, but as many other firms have demonstrated (notably Microsoft in the software market), even actually illegally leveraging a monopoly in one market to monopolize another rarely results in any remedy that is either timely enough to make any substantial impact on the utility of the action, or significant enough to outweigh the benefits you gain from doing it.
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Googles target audience is not the corporate user. It's people at home that want to backup photos and such. These people will probobly have a google account, a dropbox account, etc... etc.. The more places you can backup your data the better. If Google drops the product, oh well.
2. I don' think this needs a "Good amount of users" Much like microsoft, Google wants to offer you every option. They don't want to force you to use another companies product simply because they don't offer a "google version" The biggest threat that Google would ever face would be a company offering something they do not, and then that something becoming ubiquitous enough that the rival company could offer the same service that Google does and kill off their business (see facebook)
3. Google, like every other corporation on earth, doesn't give a shit about anti-competition regulation. They can, just like Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else, just ignore it... then, when sued, draw out the court battle so long that the companies in question will die long before any litigation is resolved. Even if they do not, the fines levied are almost always so small they are a joke. If I get a speeding ticket, the fine is about 3 days pay for me. How about when a buisness gets a fine they get a similar fine... 3days gross income. Well, that's another topic.
Question before I sign up (Score:5, Insightful)
Is my data stored in the US?
Does the US government claim to have jurisdiction over my data? (I think I know the answer to this one).
Re:Can Google be trusted with so much Private Data (Score:1, Insightful)
First, I don't get this paranoia about "Google knows everything about you!". Even if it's true, I don't really see how it matters for an average Joe like me. Somebody has to elaborate _how_ it's bad, otherwise it's on "But they know you watch porn!" level - let them, I hope they like midget tranny porn. You (or someone) really should elaborate on this sometime.
Second, why single out Google? If you're so paranoid, a) don't let single bit leave your PC unencrypted, b) don't share single bit with anyone. Also, browse all the web through anonymous VPN proxies, change them often, and so on, and so on.
Right now, every second site includes a dozen social media buttons, a few analytics scripts, some ad scripts and sticks "We reserve the right to sell your soul^W^W^Wshare anonymized untrackable cross-our-heart-unidentifiable (honest) usage data with 3rd party"
Re:5 GB (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason they give so much extra space for gmail is because most people won't even use a tenth of that space. Hell, I've had a gmail account since the service came out and I think of my like 9 gigs of space they offer, I'm still only like 1% full. I'm a heavy emailer, I just don't often need to send or receive large attachments.
Google banks on the fact that very few people put lots of data into their emails, even if some people do crazy things like use gmail as a file store, it's still worth it to advertise that amount of space to the masses. It's basically just a marketing ploy. A successful (and useful to end users) ploy, but a marketing ploy none the less.
However with a file storage service, people are far more inclined to actually utilize the space they are given. For example, I've got 5 gigs of space on Dropbox, and I'm already using 35% of it. Google will be less inclined to provide much more space for free than 5GB because more people are more inclined to actually use that space.
Re:Google Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, that's really smart of them, imposing a limit on file size to stop piracy. Cause nobody's gonna try splitting their files to get around that limit, nor would they even imagine using encryption to hide the contents of the files.
That is about as useful as DRM. Sucks for the people who use the service legitimately, easily bypassed for those who want to circumvent it anyways.