
Introducing Google Drive... yes, really - jganetsk
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html
======
primigenus
Here's the most important paragraph in the blog post that most people will
gloss over (because Google glossed over it):

"Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You
can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to
attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open
platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do
things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from
Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even
more useful apps in the future."

Specifically the app integration ecosystem they're creating with the Chrome
Web Store is extremely interesting. There's documentation for developers here:

<https://developers.google.com/drive/>

Basically, you register your app against certain mime types, and then when
users install your app into Chrome, they can now open those file types
directly from Drive using your app, seamlessly.

It's Windows' "open with" dialogue, except on the Web. That's a big deal,
because while everyone expected Drive to offer features that compete with
Dropbox, this feature competes with operating systems. I think it's a
brilliant move that shows Google thinking ahead and beyond what Dropbox is
doing.

~~~
amirmc
_"You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+"_

And this reminded me how much stuff I _already_ have sitting in Google. A
minor glitch last week meant I couldn't access my webmail (though I primarily
use IMAP), which made me start thinking about this.

I'm really pleased to see Drive come out but at the moment I feel _reluctant_
to put too much stuff into it because I become even more dependent on the big
G (and I'm actually surprised I feel this way and it's only a recent thing).
Perhaps this feeling will fade but I'm not sure.

Having an OS on my machine is great since the maker (MS/Apple) can't simply
turn it off. Having Google become my "cloud OS" makes me nervous.

~~~
magicalist
Well it's a good thing a major point of the product _is_ the local copy :)

~~~
amirmc
Yes, but that's not really what concerns me. It's that my _workflow_ runs
through those services.

To clarify, email (basically your identity online), calendars, device syncing,
now file-sharing can be run through Google (and I'm sure a whole lot of other
things too). If these were to disappear* I'd basically be left with a nice
shiny box, where I could 'work' but in a much more limited way. It would feel
like being on a digital desert island (e.g. I do this now by working in places
that don't have wireless and letting things 'sync' when I'm back online).

I guess I'm just wondering how few companies are in a position to offer
services like these, resulting in Google getting all my stuff. It's not _bad_
per se but it _is_ making me wonder what my options really are.

(edits for clarity)

*I'm referring to the odd story of people getting locked out of google accounts. I know it's rare.

~~~
jedc
People get hacked and/or locked out of accounts surprisingly often. A good
(and tech-savvy friend) was recently hacked, and managed to get thousands of
dollars transferred before found it.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, if you have a Gmail account please follow Jeff
Atwood's directions below. Turn on two-factor authentication, make sure you've
verified a phone number and recovery email address account.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-
hac...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-hacker-
proof.html)

It eliminates virtually all of the easiest "threat vectors" to your Gmail
account.

~~~
rwallace
Suppose you turn on two factor authentication, and then something happens to
the phone number you used for it. Does that mean you've effectively lost your
Gmail account? (Not a rhetorical question. I don't know how or whether you can
lose a cell phone number - as opposed to just the physical phone, which
presumably shouldn't be a problem - but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't
happen.)

~~~
mryan
The two-factor auth system does not use the phone as a phone, just as a
hardware token. Google displays a token on the login screen, you enter this in
your phone and type the code it gives you in to the login page (similar to
RSA's SecurID, but your phone is the device).

~~~
lobster_johnson
You seem to be referring to some othet Google auth system. The two-factor
system used for Google accounts sends a code via SMS that you need to enter on
the web page. It does not make you enter something on your phone.

~~~
mryan
Ah, I see. Yes, looks like Google offers multiple phone-based two-factor
systems. I was referring to the oAuth one, which uses time-based tokens rather
than sending the code via SMS.

~~~
lobster_johnson
I see. But does that qualify as a two-factor auth? You need two independent
"factors" for that, and while OAuth uses tokens internally, all it does is
ensure a secure transport between Google's servers and the app that requests
authorization. It doesn't actually obtain two different things from the user.

~~~
sirclueless
No, that's not exactly what he means. The "token" isn't the OAuth native
token, it's a 6-digit code that is based on the current time and a device
secret embedded in the app on your phone.

~~~
lobster_johnson
What you are referring to isn't part of the OAuth spec, as far as I know, is
it something particular to Google's API?

The cached access token could also be considered a factor, although it depends
on the token expiry policy. If the token doesn't require a refresh using a
refresh token (which must prompt a password) often enough its security is
compromised.

I don't know what kind of expiry Google's OAuth token has, but last time I
tested this, it was a very long time. I believe Twitter's live forever.
Facebook's offline access scope (which you will need for a normal app) lives
forever until the user changes his/her password (see
[http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2011/05/13/how-
to--...](http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2011/05/13/how-to--handle-
expired-access-tokens/)).

------
rkudeshi
[crosspost from the French translation thread - now that we have the official
details, I think this comment is better discussed here.]

So the things Google Drive has that Dropbox doesn't:

* 2-factor authentication!

* Comments on files

* OCR - like Evernote, you can search against text in images (e.g. newspaper article)

* Image recognition - if you upload a pic of the Eiffel Tower, you can find it with the search term "eiffel tower"

* Web-based file viewer - 30 file types including HD video, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.

The OCR and image recognition are going to be killer features for "normal"
people. And I imagine it's something Dropbox can't easily duplicate (unlike
the other features).

Then again, as a more privacy-minded technical person, the image recognition
feature scares the beejezus out of me. Tagging faces on Facebook is one thing,
but being able to semantically identify all contents of my images is really
stepping up the creepiness quotient.

Should be interesting to see how Dropbox responds.

~~~
rogerbinns
We should also have list going the other - things Dropbox has that GDrive
doesn't:

* Linux support * Headless (command line interface) * Public bug tracking and feature requests (votebox)

Unsure about these

* Shared folders

I'm struggling to come up with more.

~~~
TheCowboy
Dropbox possibly has better customer support compared to Google's possibly
non-existent customer support.

~~~
rogerbinns
My one experience with Dropbox support was not positive:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885618>

~~~
TheCowboy
Wow. Hopefully some healthy competition will force them to reconsider their
policy on shared folders.

------
edw519
_What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.) Google
might finally unleash GDrive and steal a lot of Dropbox's thunder (especially
if this takes place before launch.)..._

From Dropbox's 2007 YC Application,
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html>

I love reading old YC applications. I wonder if someday, they'll become the
21st century version of Harvard Business Review case studies.

~~~
EREFUNDO
Drew Houston definitely knew the threats to DropBox. I'm sure he already has a
plan to counter this. He's been ready since 2007.

~~~
SODaniel
Of course Google Drive is not a surprise to DropBox but I still feel that a
'One does not simply counter Google' Meme could be appropriate here.

~~~
thpoul
Drew Houston has an amazing sense of humor.
<https://twitter.com/#!/drewhouston/status/194837482490179584>

~~~
redthrowaway
Some of the responses are downright depressing:

Vijay Vasu ‏ @gunshotdigital

@drewhouston @Dropbox huh what? will people be able to search my files!!!
#NOTCOOL

------
robomartin
Things I'd like to see before I consider using or recommending GDrive:

\- A statement from Google regarding whether or not they will scan the data
and files in GDrive to develop further profiling information or other data
about the user

\- A guarantee from Google that GDrive will not be subject to account lockout
in the event of account suspension due to AdWords/AdSense algorithmic (or
human) triggers. In fact, I'd want that guarantee for any Google service.

Here's what Dropbox has that Google cannot currently offer: If your work in
AdSense/AdWords triggers a Google account suspension you do not loose access
to your data with Dropbox.

Being that the algorithmic shutdown can happen at any time, without notice,
warning or recourse, it is a far safer bet to keep your data on Dropbox, at
any price.

The other guarantee you have is that Dropbox will not mine your data, email
and docs to get deeper into your head and your life. Maybe Google offers this
too. I don't know. I quit looking at their terms of service a while ago. I'll
reserve judgement on that. I'm sure someone will tell me how this works.

In fact, Dropbox, the best come-back to GDrive might very well be to offer
email and document services. I know that this might be a huge undertaking, but
I am sure that there are lots of people, like myself, who have developed a
serious trust issue with Google due to the way they behave on the
AdWords/AdSense side of things.

This is an area ripe for an incursion simply because of what google isn't
doing well: Customer Service.

As I have stated on numerous posts in the past, I have zero interest in any
tool outside of Google Analytics because of the shitty approach they have to
customer-no-service everywhere else. Could I use gmail and gdocs? Of course.
Would I pay for that service? Certainly. Why don't I? Because I have zero
interest in loosing access to my data because of some shitty algorithm, the
lack of a staged approach to dealing with account issues and an even crappier
non-existing customer service philosophy.

Why I feel this way (from about a week ago):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804260>

A thought on what could be a better system:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804260>

~~~
jonknee
Why not have a Google account for work and one for personal use? Either way,
getting locked out of Drive is pretty silly--like Dropbox you always have
backups synced on your machines.

~~~
robomartin
I think there's evidence of Goggle detecting multiple accounts and suspending
all of them when an algo triggers on one of the accounts. I can't vouch for
this but I remember reading posts about such things maybe a year ago.

It's not necessarily about loosing data or loosing GDrive alone. There are
many scenarios one could think of. Firstly, if your account gets locked out
you loose ALL Google services. If you've been using Gmail for years, it's
gone. Documents? Gone. Everything Google, gone. It doesn't matter if you are
paying for the service or not. It's gone and you have virtually no recourse.

One possible GDrive scenario (of the many one could imagine) is that of
someone going on a family trip and uploading photos to GDrive during the trip
to make room on their flash card. Somewhere along their Google account is
suspended because of, well, who knows? All of their photos are gone.

Business trip. Upload your presentation and other materials to GDrive. Travel
light. Account suspended by the time you get to your destination. Screwed.

With GDrive storage options reaching terabytes there will be many instances of
people relying on GDrive for primary storage. That can certainly be the case
with Google Docs, where the documents themselves are created online as well.

Clearly this is not an issue for the vast majority of Google account holders.
This is due to the fact that account suspensions are more widely reported for
users of AdSense and AdWords. In other words, business users. Your average
Google user would not (and should not) have this problem. This is good for
average consumers yet bad in that there might not be enough of an incentive
for Google to be compelled to change their ways and be more reasonable with
business users. What they telegraph is that they really couldn't give a rats
ass if they kill-off someone's account because it doesn't even move one atom
in their revenue stream. Tough problem to solve if you are nobody, as is the
case for most of us.

~~~
jonknee
Google encourages people to have multiple accounts in some cases (they even
tried their best to force it when converting products over to Google Apps), I
think you only get in trouble if you are banned and then try to use another
account for the same activity.

I'd create a Google Apps for business account and use that for all business
stuff (AdSense/AdWords/Analytics). They won't disable that and you get phone
support.

------
richardw
Been waiting for this one for a while. But...doesn't feel right to me.

It synced down my Google Docs files. Except it didn't. They're not, say, Excel
files, which I assume the average user will expect. AFAICT they're shortcuts
into Google Docs, which I didn't really need since I know where those are
already, to a close-enough approximation. So now on my local drive I have two
classes of spreadsheet. Real spreadsheets and links to my online spreadsheets,
which kinda mirrors normal hyperlinks to online spreadsheets, so we have two
classes of those now as well. I can't really predict what will happen if I
download the file as Excel and put it into my Google Drive directory. I guess
I'll have two files, but will my newly created Excel file be a new doc online?
What will happen if I delete the local links?

Created a text file in my local drive. Waited. Nothing appeared in Docs.
Right-click the file to "sync", no menu item. Right-click the directory, no
menu item. Click different Docs directories. Nothing. At some point, it
appeared. That's a temporary issue and can be fixed, but those details count.

Dropbox/Sugarsync feels a bit more predictable. I'll sync, that's it. I have a
button I can push to make it do something predictable. Seems less magical.

File sync is a square hole. Google Docs is a round peg. Feels like the
reasoning behind this is boardroom-strategy-level, not user-level.

Right now Dropbox/Sugarsync will keep my business. Earlier today I put one
minute towards grandfathering a Skydrive account to 25GB free, just in case
that proves useful. Hope I'm wrong and Google Drive feels more useful
tomorrow.

~~~
the_bear
I'm also getting a "round peg/square hole" vibe. Google has been telling us
for years that the folder metaphor is outdated and we should use search to
stay organized. So when I set up desktop sync I ended up with a folder full of
hundreds of unorganized documents. This isn't Google's fault (I kind of saw it
coming) but it definitely supports your claim that Google Docs wasn't the
right vehicle for desktop sync.

Also, what happens if I open an email attachment in Google Docs just so I can
view it (I don't use MS Office)? It seems like that will instantly sync it to
the top level of my GDrive folder on my computer, so I'll end up with a huge
mess of files there. Same thing if I click a link to view a public Google Doc
(I'm guessing).

There's a lot to like about GDrive, but forcing it into Google Docs makes it
seem like a really messy and inelegant product.

------
aresant
I recently upgraded to Dropbox @ $199/yr for 100gb to archive our digital
photos.

Yesterday MSFT skydrive offered 100gb for $50/yr.

Today GOOG offers 400GB for $100/yr or 1TB for $256/yr.

As a consumer with "offsite backup" in mind, there doesn't seem to be an
inherently high switching cost to move services away from DropBox.

As a result I think that they're going to need to reassess pricing strategy
within the year.

ref: Goog pricing <https://accounts.google.com/b/0/PurchaseStorage?hl=en_US>

~~~
Smerity
I saw the same pricing as you did but it _just_ changed as I refreshed the
page a second time.

1 TB now costs $49.99 per month, or $600/year. This is a substantial jump from
$256/year and means it's no longer an attractive proposition...

~~~
celalo
It was available just minutes ago!! I landed a 200GB space for $50/year just
before they changed the pricing plans. I should have gone for more :)

~~~
hornbaker
I think you got an "old pricing plan," which does _not_ include Google Drive:

[http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567&p=butter_old_storage)

I'm in the same boat, having had an 80GB plan for $20/yr for some time now.

~~~
huggyface
_I think you got an "old pricing plan," which does not include Google Drive_

I actually bought an 80GB "old" plan this morning ($20 isn't that big of a
bet) after seeing the leak of the upcoming pricing, essentially trying to
grandfather in a more favorable plan. While the comparison implies that the
old plan doesn't have gdrive, I most certainly have it and have the full 80GB
available in it. Further I retain the ability to renew the 80GB plan in a year
without adopting a new plan.

Perhaps they are simply saying that the people who bought the old plan got a
lower price given that they didn't price in google Drive, however they
definitely seem to be rolling that functionality in.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
I did the same thing. $1.67 a month (literally the price of my daily coffee)
seemed very reasonable for 80GB of cloud storage with all the googly
integration.

------
huhtenberg
Well, this pretty much exhausts the pool of people who don't care for the data
privacy. On the plus side, those who do want privacy are still waiting for a
proper solution, and it is an opportunity.

(edit) It is really shocking how absolutely mind-bogglingly ignorant people
are when it comes to their data privacy matters. How could any business person
in a sane state of mind choose to share its data with some 3rd party company.
Business plans, emails, _everything_. And Google actively promoting such
behavior and endorsing ignorance - this goes well beyond "evil." It is one of
the greatest disservices to the state of the digital culture of our times. So,
yeah, great to see more of the same. Yay to the gDrive!

~~~
namityadav
I have been looking (for years) for a "good" online storage/sync solution that
allows me to store my documents using my own private key. TrueCrypt etc don't
reach the "set it, and forget it" level.

But when you think about how much more expensive storing those documents will
be for these companies (as each copy of the same document will be encrypted
with a separate private key), and how much value these companies will miss out
on because they won't be able to scan our documents, it's understandable why I
may never find such a solution.

~~~
boxy_brown
BoxCryptor: <http://www.boxcryptor.com/>

Provides a pain-free encrypted layer on top of free cloud storage services
like DropBox. BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, then stores the encrypted
files in DropBox. If your DropBox account is compromised the adversary will
only get useless encrypted files. Uses EncFS. Has clients for Windows and Mac.
The Android and iOS clients are amazing.

To me, the most surprising thing about BoxCryptor is that it's easier to use
than DropBox--not an easy feat.

~~~
manveru
Also claims to work on Linux:
<http://www.boxcryptor.com/download/#platform_linux_dl>

------
pg
Anyone know if this is the original Google Drive they wrote all those years
ago and never launched, or a new thing they reused the name for?

~~~
franze
Gdrive was killed in 2008 (according to Steven Levy's book _In the Plex_ after
some top management lobbying by Sundar Pichai .. the guy who now wrote the
blogpost) but as this was 4 years ago and a lot of waves have passed since
then, I suspect - without any internal knowledge - that this is a complete new
iteration of the same topic.

~~~
EREFUNDO
I wonder how different this is from insync ( insynchq.com ) when it comes to
syncing googledocs.

~~~
andybak
The main difference I can see is that insync creates MS file formats when it
syncs (.xls, .doc etc) whilst GDrive creates .gsheet, .gdoc files which for me
just open Google Docs in Chrome.

Interesting difference. Google's approach isn't very good for
interoperability.

edit: and incidentally insync has failed to comprehend me moving a stack of
files into a folder and instead created duplicates. Syncing is a hard problem
with lots of edge cases (and on that note Chrome bookmark sync deleted 5 years
of bookmarks)

------
mmastrac
The clock is ticking on Dropbox to lower their price. I'm paying $99/year for
50GB, but I'd be getting 100GB for $60/year over at Google. I'm already
banging up against my 50GB limit - I may actually jump over to Google before
my subscription is up just because the prices are so good.

~~~
AdrianRossouw
i'm the opposite.

i just need another 500mb, and i just dont need to pay another $10/m for a
bunch of disk space i won't use. everyone i know already has dropbox too, so
referrals are out.

I hope the pricing of dropbox lowers soon too.

~~~
stanmancan
Find one of the many "$100 of Adword credit free" coupons around, create an ad
with your Dropbox referral link, sit back and watch your storage limit
increase a couple times per hour.

~~~
deltaqueue
I wouldn't recommend this unless you have specifically received one of these
coupons at your email address. I used someone else's and my account was
permanently suspended. Only after some negotiation was I able to make Google
reverse the "permanent" suspension (a rarity, from what I have seen).

~~~
stanmancan
It wasn't hard to find one that I received myself. I've got coupons in
magazines, hostgator, domain resellers... it shouldn't be too hard to come
across one legitimately.

------
franze
hmmm, hmmm .. "Posted by Sundar Pichai" - isn't that the guy who convinced
Googles top management in 2008 to kill - the ready for launch - GDrive because
files are "deprecated", "ungoogly" and a "thing of the past" (according to
steven levys book "in the plex") - wonder what changed since then (DropBox?
Evernote? ...)

~~~
adgar
> wonder what changed since then (DropBox? Evernote? ...)

You're on the wrong track. What's changed since then is GDrive - what do you
think all those involved were doing in the last 4 years?

~~~
franze
>what do you think all those involved were doing in the last 4 years?

well my sarcastic self suggests: 3 1/2 years of those 4 years probably: google
wave, google buzz, google search wiki, google site annotations, google knol
and - not to forget - google plus

------
numlocked
To anyone else who uses a custom Google apps domain, it looks like Drive may
not be available for a few more weeks:
[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2490030)

Edit: Not so. You can enable the "rapid release" track for your domain by
following the instructions here: <http://whatsnew.googleapps.com/choose-
release-track> It may take "up to a day" for the setting to take effect, but
once it does your domain's users should be able to opt into Drive right away
from <https://drive.google.com/start>

~~~
znq
How does that work with the Mac client? Can you easily add a second or third
account? Or can you only log in with one account?

------
namityadav
This is very aggressive pricing from Google. With Microsoft offering 25GB for
free (although for a limited time, and only to its existing users), and Google
offering 100GB for $5/mo, the online storage space is finally heating up. The
tight integration with Google Docs, and (in case of Microsoft) Office Web
Apps, and valuable features like OCR and Image recognition means that these
companies are now offering services on top of their online storage that
Dropbox doesn't.

Dropbox definitely has a head-start today, but Google and Microsoft have the
scale to offer better prices, existing platforms to tightly integrate their
solutions with (Android and Windows), and the brand-power to pull people away
from Dropbox. This may be the first time Dropbox has some real competition.

------
rsbrown
As a satisfied (and paying) Dropbox user, Google is pushing all the right
buttons for me with this:

\- More storage space, lower price

\- Ecosystem for 3rd-party apps

\- Integration with existing Google services _and_ two-factor authentication

I like Dropbox and would love to keep using them, but they will need to
respond strongly and quickly if they want to keep my business.

~~~
dpcan
I'm on the exact same page. I'm going to give it a week. If I don't see a
response from DropBox, because price is a factor, I'm just going to switch. I
know it seems harsh, but the reality is, we're talking about more than just
drive space now. This integration with my Gmail and Docs is huge.

------
cmer
Very aggressive pricing! Dropbox is 4 times more expensive for 100 GB. $5/mo
vs $20. Will be interesting to see how Dropbox reacts to that.

~~~
TomGullen
80GB on Drive is $1.60 a month ($20 a year). DropBox 100GB is $20 a month!

~~~
TomatoTomato
That is incorrect, you are looking at the old Google account storage costs.
These are different and may supersede the old pricing.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the
high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your
grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and
still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to
25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When
you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to
25GB.

~~~
Groxx
I don't know if it is, though. I have Google's +20gb plan from an earlier
purchase, and it gives me 25gb in Drive too, for $5 per year.

~~~
TomatoTomato
Is this still the case? Mine only shows 5GB.

edit: My Drive updated! You are currently using 17 MB (0%) of your 87040 MB.
Should have bought more...

~~~
Groxx
It's still there, yeah. I do notice that we're using two different links,
though. The 'upgrade' link sent me here:
<https://accounts.google.com/b/0/PurchaseStorage?hl=en_US> which looks like
this: <http://cl.ly/2S07190C2B1c0z1K1z2G> while yours (from the other thread
here) seems to be going to <https://www.google.com/settings/storage/?hl=en>
and looks like this: <http://cl.ly/1P1I1s2K3f2H3v0e321g>

(pseudo-edit while typing) I think I found it:
<http://cl.ly/0d3r3F1343132g131y36> (notice down at the bottom) though all the
'learn more' links just take me to the essentially-useless help home-page,
rather than to a place where I could actually learn more.

What do you get if you go to my first link? Might there be time to grandfather
in a better plan?

Actual edit: woah - it just started redirecting me to the more expensive
option (hasn't been for the past 1/2 hour). wtf.

------
MikeCapone
Here's one thing that bugs me; Google Drive seems to constantly use between 2
and 3% of my CPU time. That's wasteful. If I was on a laptop, this would be
battery time, and on my desktop, I want those cycles to be used for
distributing computing science, not random background processes that aren't
supposed to be doing anything when idle.

~~~
bunnyhero
That sounds bad. Since I am primarily a laptop user, I am very picky about
which online sync and backup services I use based on the resource usage of
their desktop clients.

~~~
bunnyhero
Follow-up anecdotal data: Drive app on my 1st-gen MacBook Air is using 2-4%
CPU, even when "paused."

(For comparison, the Dropbox client uses 0 to 0.2% CPU when idling.)

------
AlexandrB
The bottom line for me is that I no longer trust Google enough to use this.
Pricing, etc. don't matter if the privacy of my data is up for grabs.

~~~
johnpowell
I'm in the same boat. The the thought of installing this never crossed my
mind. A few months ago I even set up my own email server on a spare Linode so
I could ditch Gmail.

------
mikek
Interesting... they are not just going after Dropbox with Google Drive, but
also Evernote.

"Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even
recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
technology."

~~~
jcampbell1
Is OCR really the feature that makes Evernote a popular product? I don't use
it, but I have seen people use it, and it looks more like a notebook that
syncs across all your devices. There is little notion of "files". I can't
imagine this will have much effect on Evernote.

~~~
esun
It's a great feature if you scan lots of documents and want to search them.

This way I have one place to store both typed and scanned stuff, and it gets
me close to paperless at home.

------
tlogan
I'm not sure if anybody mention this but GDrive actually _does not_ download
documents to your local machine. It just adds a json document pointing to file
to edit.

So what is point of GDrive?

~~~
rjv
This seems to only be the case with "Google" document formats (Google
document, Google spreadsheet, etc). Every other file type seems to sync local
files appropriately.

~~~
tlogan
But it is Google Docs... Meaning I still have to use some other tool to have
offline access (and backup) of my documents?

Isn't whole point of Dropbox to have offline access and (multiple) offline
backups of your files?

~~~
Achshar
those files will be opened with google docs web app. the web app itself can
work offline. so your docs work offline.

~~~
doctoboggan
How do I enable this feature? Whenever I try to access my docs offline the
page simply does not load.

I am using a google apps account if that makes a difference.

~~~
Achshar
There is an option in settings drop down from top left of the homepage od
docs. Also the offline url is <https://docs.google.com/offline>. But you need
to set up offline first from the menu i wrote about above.

------
atdt
This seems buggy. I created an archive subfolder and moved all my old Google
docs there. This change (which presumably touches metadata only) took
_minutes_ to sync (on a fast connection) and failed on one file with this
mysterious error: "Upload Error - An unknown issue has occurred."

Also: no option to disable the dock icon or turn off the hypnotic animation
while files are syncing. Ugh.

~~~
Drbble
You can hide any app's dock icon with a preference setting. NSUIElement or
something. It's a setting in the app's info.plist or somewhere. This is a
standard Mac technique, not an app-specific functionality.

------
sakai
In my mind, two factor authentification is a killer feature here. Now if they
can also have password-protected link sharing, this will be a much better
choice for small businesses or privacy-minded individuals.

~~~
rkudeshi
Do they actually have 2-factor authentication, though? The French translation
seemed to include it, but I don't see any mention of it here.

Edit: Yep, it does have it. Interesting that they don't mention it anywhere in
the blog post or on the official site - you'd think it'd be a selling point
compared to Dropbox.

~~~
JaggedJax
I just installed it on my PC and linked it to my account which has 2-factor
enabled. It asked me for the code and worked like a charm.

------
etrain
Don't see any formal Linux support, anyone know if they'll open up their API
or support with FUSE?

~~~
286c8cb04bda
The API is already open: <https://developers.google.com/drive/>

~~~
ajross
But that's an API for chrome apps. You couldn't write a linux-based sync
client, or FUSE mount, etc... Basically Linux users have access to the
ecosystem of online apps, but not access to the files in the native filesystem
(one of the things that makes Dropbox such a killer app). Frustrating.

~~~
icebraining
The API seems a simple RPC over HTTP. I don't see why you couldn't write a
FUSE adapter based on it.

~~~
ajross
Yeah, reading further that might be the case. My initial scan said that the
apps had to be present in the chrome market and approved. But the REST API
looks like it just authenticates via OAuth and does the I/O directly by the
client (FWIW: the OAuth authentication would be an annoying step for a
background FUSE daemon, but not insoluble). I don't know which is correct.

------
roqetman
Engadget is crunching the numbers (comparing the different services (google
drive, dropbox, icloud, skydrive)):
[http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/google-drive-vs-the-
compe...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/google-drive-vs-the-competition-
dropbox-skydrive-icloud/)

------
rogerbinns
Don't forget that Google also has a history of disabling accounts and
providing no communication, support or other mechanisms to get it restored.
Usually kicking up an almighty fuss in public if you have a prominent
twitter/blog works but do you really want to be at their mercy for that?

------
jl6
There is a huge economy of scale working in Google's favor: deduplication. The
more users they can de-dupe across, the cheaper their raw storage becomes. To
compete, perhaps smaller backup services could agree "reinsurance" contracts
with each other, exchanging lists of file hashes...

~~~
creamyhorror
Good point. As storage gets cheaper, more people will be induced to store mass
media in the cloud, which tends to be a lot more duplicated than personal
media like photographs and videos. And that's going to be a big win for the
provider with the best ability to dedupe.

------
lifeisstillgood
Did anyone else think "no, they cannot really be releasing a car the drives
itself already?"

Just me then. I think it was the yes really that got me.

Sadly, still no dropbox-alike for FreeBSD. Would swap in an instant.

------
zach
So if I have desktop software, can I put a button on my download page that
instantly copies the zip file to the user's Google Drive from my own?

If not, would anyone like to make one? That seems like a convenient option for
users, not to mention the bandwidth savings.

~~~
Drbble
You would just share the file to their account, like you do in Docs now.

------
saadmalik01
Something's "fishy" with this whole Dropbox vs. Google Drive thing:
[https://twitter.com/#!/SaadMalik/status/194838393874677760/p...](https://twitter.com/#!/SaadMalik/status/194838393874677760/photo/1)

------
jashkenas
Can anyone (perhaps from Google) comment as to whether the OCR feature in
Google Drive is just Tesseract + OCRopus, or something different?

------
taylorbuley
"Our team will be on Stack Overflow to answer any questions you have when
integrating your app with Google Drive."

This is awesome thinking: <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-
drive-sdk>

via [http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-
goo...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-
and-google.html)

------
trotsky
no linux platform "coming soon" - too bad

~~~
antihero
Don't they use Linux a lot internally, too?

It's really awful that companies such as Box, Google etc are not supporting
the Linux desktop, especially seeing as desktop linux is actually a really
attractive option right now - better memory management than OSX and
installable on pretty much any device, and Windows is pretty much a joke for
non-.NET development or unless you game.

Fuck, their Android platform is based on Linux yet they don't support Linux
desktop? That's pretty shitty.

~~~
ok_craig
Not having a Drive client for Linux (yet) doesn't mean Google as a company
does not support Linux at all. For example, Chrome is supported on Linux. We
don't know - Drive for Linux may come further down the line. The reality is
that a relatively small fraction of consumers use Linux at home or work. If I
were releasing a new product, Linux wouldn't be one of my top priorities
either.

~~~
glesica
Agreed, but the "techie" crowd tend to be the early adopters for products like
this and help drive others to use them. It's not totally crazy of Google not
to support Linux out of the gate (for the reasons you and others noted) but it
is a little surprising, nonetheless.

------
philp
Has anybody tried syncing extisting folders via symlinks? Using Dropbox this
is how I prefer to keep track of folders outside of the actually Dropbox
folder. Google Drive just seems to ignore them. Not being able to include
other folders would pretty much be a deal-breaker for me :( Any ideas?

~~~
nessus42
God, I hope that Google Drive doesn't start following symlinks. That behavior
of Dropbox is completely broken and dangerous, and furthermore makes it
impossible to use symbolic links for what they're supposed to be used for.

When symlinks are synced, they should be copied "opaquely", not
"transparently". I.e., the link itself should be synced, not what the link
points to. Opaque syncing of symlinks is the standard way to sync symlinks on
Unix, and is what 30 years of experience with symlinks has taught us.
Forgetting this painful lesson of history would be tragic.

~~~
philp
Tragic indeed. May the deities hear your outcry!

Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other
means? I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced
any unexpected behavior.

~~~
nessus42
> _Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other
> means?_

As others have mentioned, do the symlinks in the other direction. Or lobby
Google to provide explicit configuration for syncing multiple folders.

> _I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced any
> unexpected behavior._

It's anything _but_ elegant! What happens, for instance if you drag and drop a
folder into your synced folder, and unbeknownst to you this folder has a
symlink in it to the root directory of the computer? Nothing good can happen,
I assure you, if symlinks are synced transparently!

Additionally, I already heavily use symlinks for their intended purpose. E.g.,
I have lots of symlinks between files and folders to make it easier for me to
find and navigate all my stuff. What happens if I want to have my folder "my-
lifes-work", which is already a twisty maze of files, folders, and symlinks,
and I want it synced between all my computers? If symlinks are synced
opaquely, no problem: I just drop this into the synced folder, and everything
is golden. If I drop this into a folder where links are synced transparently,
who knows what hellish things result.

Maybe you think that Google shouldn't give a rat's ass about the needs of
fellows such as myself, since I'm not in the mainstream, but symlinks were
invented for people such as me. Not for programs to hijack for completely
different purposes.

I actually did drop "my-lifes-work" into my Windows Live Mesh folder. Live
Mesh is a lot like Dropbox and Google Drive. This actually works fine because
Live Mesh ignores the symlinks. I.e., if A is my original computer which has
the symlinks, and B is my second computer which didn't have "my-lifes-work" on
before now, then after syncing, B ends up with everything that A has, only
without the symlinks. This is okay for me, since I wrote a program to sync the
symlinks out of band. This is less that ideal, but it's better than nothing.

Oh, for the day, when stuff such as this will just work the way that the gods
intended it to!

------
andrewljohnson
The pricing of this service is an eye-popper. I've avoided cloud backups for
years because of Dropbox-like prices.

At $256/TB/year, I can back up all my stuff, and never think twice.

Game changed!

~~~
Drbble
The price tripled since you last checked.

~~~
andrewljohnson
So it did, make much more sense now :)

~~~
checkers
It would make more sense if you visit this link.
<http://techiest.blogspot.com/>. All about technology baby!

------
Maven911
And here I thought they got their self-driving car productified..especially
with a title like that. Imagine my disappointment when its just another
"dropbox"

------
Xyzodiac
Seriously Google?

For a company that uses their own version of Ubuntu internally, makes a
killing off their Linux based mobile OS, and is trying to carve a whole new
market with their Gentoo Linux based ChromeOS, it's unquestionably sad that
Google Drive did not have Linux support out the door.

~~~
mlreed328
Isn't the percentage of Linux in use on the desktop about ~1.5%?

It's a business decision. If I understand the percentage correctly Linux on
the desktop really is an afterthought from a bottom line perspective
regardless of how prevalent it is on the server or in mobile.

------
mlreed328
Not trying to nay-say here- genuine question follows.

Is the goal of this service ultimately that I back up all of my personal
files, work files, collaborative files, etc so that they can be analyzed and
an advertising profile can be created/enhanced based on the contents?

Seems to me that this would make a lot of sense for Google. Let us store all
of your goodies and cheaply. Don't mind us while we have a non-personally
identifiable and algorithmically brillant peak at the contents so we can serve
ads better and create a advertising/marketing/buyer permanent record of sorts
for you.

Again, not a conspiracy theory. Just wondering, because that occurred to me as
a real opportunity for them. Seeing some comments below this has occurred to
others.

------
i386
Wait, their blog says its available today but all I get is a "Notify me when
its ready" button when I visit <http://drive.google.com/start> ?

So its a soft launch for technology journalists then? What gives?

~~~
mlreed328
Same here...

------
mark_l_watson
Cost is not an issue compared to convenience. From 1992 to about 4 years ago,
I used mostly Linux (desktop and servers). Now I have gone down the dark path
of living in APple's little walled garden (except for servers). I don't care
if Google Drive is a lot cheaper than iCloud: with OS X Mountain Lion and an
iPad, using Apple's iCloud storage is just more convenient. BTW, with OS X
Mountain Lion it is strange that for some apps the default storage is iCloud
and not your local disk (although obviously you work from a local copy).

That said, it will be interesting to see apps built on top of Google Drive
APIs.

~~~
zmmmmm
I agree that cost is not the main factor here, because the real battle is
being fought in the free tier of all these services anyway.

However I'm not sure iCloud wins on convenience unless you live entirely
inside an Apple ecosystem (and even if you do, do you want more lockin than
you have already?).

For me convenience is about universality: which ever company gives me the best
experience across every platform is the one that wins. iCloud fails because
Apple has a fundamental conflict of interest in making your experience better
on iOS vs everything else. Of course, they also can employ anticompetitive
measures to ensure that all other services are worse on iOS so I guess it sort
of evens out. Google has some similar issues but I think they have a much
broader interest in making their service universal than Apple does. Mainly, I
don't really trust Google to get the quality up to par ... so many of their
services seem to get 95% of the way there and never get the final bugs ironed
out because they are "good enough". But we'll see.

------
krishna2
What a nice opportunity that Microsoft squandered - they should've stuck out
with the 25GB free option (Like they had for existing users) - that would make
today's announcement so little. Marketing win and perception win! (just like
what gmail did back in April 2004). After all, their data did show that less
than 1% of users cross 7GB - so they should've trusted that and went along
with it.

Also, it would now makes sense for Dropbox to go even bigger - as in build
their own data center, storage network ..etc (ala crashplan..etc). Being on
top of s3 would allow one to be only as cheap as s3 can be.

------
Groxx
> _You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or
> even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail
> account storage will also expand to 25GB._

That's... odd. I'm paying $5/year to get 25gb of storage across Docs, Gmail,
Picasa, and I see it also applies to Drive (just checked) (which is basically
Docs anyway). Considerably less than $2.50/month. The 1TB is less than 1/2 the
price listed, and there's no 100GB option at all.

Might there be pricing changes coming soon, or is this just a series of
strange typos?

~~~
ben1040
<https://www.google.com/settings/storage/>

The pricing changed today. It is considerably less attractive now.

It looks like I'm grandfathered into $20/year for 80GB, but if I wanted to go
up to 100GB the pricing is now $4.99/month.

~~~
Groxx
They're doing a _lot_ more with the data now, so I suppose it makes sense. But
I wonder how many people would choose the old option for 'dumb' storage.
Currently, I would, though that may change in a few months.

~~~
spinchange
The dumb storage had far better economics for the user. I love Google products
and services, but my immediate impression here is that it's a total step
backward for users like me who were already using some kind of local sync app
(Insync, OfficSync, etc) w/ paid-extra Google storage - just for documents.

All the extras like the additional gmail space, GDrive integration with other
products (but not our dumb storage) seems like ancillary stuff to sell it/lock
you into the platform.

Like you, I'm interested to see how I feel about this in a few months.

------
pgrote
They've changed their existing storage plans and policies. I bought additional
storage for my photos through Picasa. The storage was made available across
all Google products.

I had the 20gig for $5.00 plan. I say had, because I went to the Drive plan
page and was told:

* Your current plan is no longer offered. Learn more.

The page redirect goes here:

[http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567&p=butter_old_storage)

No idea why it is called butter.

The excellent thing is that you are grandfathered in.

------
pork
A future feature that might get me to switch: automatically download many
years worth of Gmail attachments to my GDrive. It would be AWESOME to go
through picture attachments from years ago.

------
pazimzadeh
I'm really happy that they skipped the whole beta/invitation launch.

~~~
its_so_on
I'm not! It means hacking there is dead, and the whole company is run by
marketing consultants.

~~~
Lewisham
What on earth are you talking about? Google's infrastructure is so large it
can handle the same sort of influx that Gmail would have generated, whereas
back then they couldn't.

Why on earth does that mean the company is run by marketing consultants?

~~~
its_so_on
the same reason 20% time is dead and requires management approval. do I really
have to spell it out? (google maps started as an engineer fooling around with
ajax).

~~~
Splines
Do you work at Google? I'm curious, because according to others, while 20%
time does technically require management approval, it's usually not a problem.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3703018>

Also, inferring company culture from the lack of a visible public beta is a
bit of an assumption, don't you think?

~~~
rachelbythebay
Going from "it's your time, nobody can take it away from you, but it's up to
you to take it", as it was in my day, to "it requires management approval" is
a big difference to me. Would you agree?

------
redler
The help page for "Google Storage Plans"[1] is muddled. It now states that a
base Gmail account provides 10GB of space, full stop. Unless they're rounding
up from the old up-ticking 7+GB, this seems to be a policy change. But a
little further down on the very same page: "If you've reached or exceeded the
7 GB free storage limit, all new incoming emails will hard bounce."

It also states "When you run out of free storage space, Google offers a way to
purchase storage space shared across Google Drive and Picasa Web Albums (which
includes photos uploaded to Blogger)."

But further down: "If you run out of free storage for Google Drive or Picasa
you can purchase additional storage that is shared across these products. When
you purchase a Google storage plan your Gmail storage limit will increase to
25 GB." This implies that a purchase of any storage plan includes not only the
storage with that plan, but also an extra 25GB for Gmail.

I'm hoping that's the way it works, and that this policy extends individually
to legacy Apps for Domains accounts, whose free users currently have to be
upgraded en masse to paid accounts to get any additional storage.

[1]
[http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375124&p=storage_overview)

------
bad_user
I was already paying $20 / year for 80 GB of storage that I was using for
backing up my photos on Picasa.

Unfortunately the new plans are way more expensive, especially since my photo
collection is growing like crazy and I'll end up needing much more than that.

If there's one thing I hate about Google is that you cannot rely on their
pricing. They did the same thing with App Engine.

I'm also using the free version of Google Apps. Maybe I should reconsider.

~~~
juliano_q
You know that this price will remain the same for the old users, right?

~~~
bad_user
Aren't old users supposed to upgrade to the new plan once the old one expires?

Unfortunately my subscription expires in 3 months from now.

------
karpathy
Few of my observations from this announcement:

In Google's vision of the future, your computer is a thin client. There is no
My Documents folder, as everything personal lives on gdrive. The Chrome app
store becomes the new operating system. Apps will have access to your files,
they will be able to search them, open them, and operate on them. You will
never see the "Open file" dialog box again.

In this world, the concept of a file on your local computer in some folder
does not exist. Your stuff is simply available to you from the cloud from
whatever computer. The abstraction or concept of a "file" or "folder" will
fade. Our children will not know what these words mean. They will see their
pictures in a web interface with location and time overlayed, completely
oblivious to the fact that it happens to be stored as a .jpg file somewhere on
google servers and an associated .txt file that contains some meta data about
it.

We are finally moving beyond (arbitrary) abstractions from mid 1900's. I like
this future.

~~~
nikcub
This has been the theme for years. It is the argument that killed the original
Google Drive and why Google are so late to the party.

What they didn't realize is that you need a drive product in order to migrate
users from the old desktop files paradigm to the new web services.

I see Google Drive, SkyDrive and Dropbox as nothing more than a temporary
bridge between the old world and the new world. I am already using webapps and
web files for ~90% of my work, there is just a few little things that I still
do in the desktop world, such as image editing.

The opportunity here for entrepreneurs is to look at old file and app usage
and work out where the gaps are in good online services. I wouldn't worry too
much about providing the actual storage, since that is now a race to the
bottom, and providing the operating system or app aggregator is also now a
free business, the good business will all be in the web based apps.

------
jebblue
Does Dropbox intrusively scan personal files, if not then I'd prefer to go
with them since I don't want Google prying into my files.

~~~
ch0wn
Why would Google - or any other company for that matter - spend time and money
on something as complicated and error-prone like that? They would never be
able to sell it to anyone and it could ruin their brand substantially if it
ever came out.

I don't see why you would even consider this to be happening.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Why would Google - or any other company for that matter - spend time and
> money on something as complicated and error-prone like that?

This is a problem of technology. These tend to go away over time (e.g.
Youtube's automatic copyrighted content detection). Bottom line is that the
ethics and policies of the underlying company make me question the privacy of
my data from the get-go.

------
hornbaker
1 TB on Google Drive = $50/mo

1 TB on Amazon S3 = $125/mo (down to $55/mo for 5,000 TB)

Being based on S3, Dropbox is going to have a tough time competing on price.

~~~
morsch
That's assuming Dropbox pays the regular S3 fees...

------
jimmar
The official blog says you can buy 100 GB for $4.99 a month. If I go to my
google accounts settings page to try to buy it, itsays 200 GB for $50 a year.
Something is not lined up correctly. I'd pay $50 right now and get rid of
Carbonite if I thought it would pay off, but I don't want to get stung paying
$50 for the wrong type of storage.

~~~
jimmar
Well, I went to Google Drive again, and this time when I clicked the upgrade
button I saw the pricing consistent with the official announcement.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
If you had purchased 200GB for $50 you could have used it for Drive -
[http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567&p=butter_old_storage)

------
jmount
Woohoo! A place to store your stuff until you get your Google Account banned
or Google loses interest (~9 months).

------
driverdan
Absolutely no mention of how files are protected. Is encryption used? Is it
technically possible for a Google employee with proper access to view your
files (with private key encryption it'd be impossible)? Should we assume this
is this on par with Gmail email attachments (viewable by certain employees)?

~~~
kijin
> _Can Google employees access your files?_

Do bears shit in the woods?

~~~
packetslave
Quoting from google.com/privacy: "We restrict access to personal information
to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information
in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual
confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail
to meet these obligations."

Speaking as a Googler, everything I've seen indicates a strong company-wide
emphasis (both technological and process/policy) on user privacy. Not only who
CAN access your individual data, but who DID access it and why.

~~~
driverdan
I've updated my post. I didn't mean does everyone have access, I meant is it
even technically possible for someone with proper access to view the original
file. If files are encrypted properly then no one at the company would be able
to access them.

~~~
amalter
Clearly unencrypted. They dedup, enable OCR searching, transparent online
access to office style documents, etc.. These features would not be possible
if they encrypted your bytes before being sent over the wire.

You might want to look into Tarsnap. It's more expensive and you don't get the
fancy features, but they offer opaque encrypted file handling. Also, there
have been a couple niche strong privacy centered providers that have commented
in this thread.

I suppose one could create a Truecrypt container and have GDrive sync it in
the background. Wonder if Google will ever complain about files they can't
process.

~~~
packetslave
_Clearly unencrypted. They dedup ..._

Just like Dropbox does.

------
macrael
Is Dropbox just screwed on pricing vs. Google Drive? Their help docs say they
still rely on S3 for storing all user data: <https://www.dropbox.com/help/7>
They can't price lower than what Amazon is giving them, no?

------
antihero
Are they even planning Linux support?

~~~
davidcollantes
Do it, there are APIs!

~~~
antihero
I don't have to "Do it" with Dropbox.

------
bvdbijl
Can anyone find information on file versioning? How long and how many
versioned files are stored?

~~~
dermatthias
30 days, and you can pin certain versions.

------
akrymski
Aren't there two completely separate use cases?

1\. Syncing files across different computers: think git for docs.

2\. Backing up files: no versioning necessary

Price points for these should be different imo. I'd live with a backup that
offers little redundancy cause there is a small chance that my backup and my
laptop die at the same time. S3 & Dropbox are expensive in large part due to
that redundancy.

I only use Dropbox for syncing a small set of docs and live with the free
account just fine. I should probably use online backup at some point but I
just don't feel like the S3 solution is appropriate for this. I dont need my
photos or music stored in 3 different data centers across the globe, and I
don't want it to sync to all my computers either.

------
amirmc
Why do people here expect Dropbox to 'respond'?

As far as I'm aware, their growth (primarily) comes from people inviting each-
other and they're obviously device/OS agnostic. Yes, the pricing is way
different but we shouldn't assume that's the major driver for most people.

~~~
rkudeshi
Simple: Everybody and their mother already has a Google account.

It's a lot easier to tell someone to use Google Drive instead of creating an
account on Dropbox and installing their software and going through the whole
rigamarole.

Unlike SkyDrive et al, Drive is aiming right at the throat of Dropbox and
Google has the money to make sure it succeeds (see G+).

Dropbox doesn't have to compete on price (I don't think it's as big a factor
as everyone makes it out to be), but they do have to think about improving the
feature set.

If Dropbox doesn't respond, they do so at their own peril.

~~~
amirmc
Applying the principle of anecdote==fact, I have to disagree with the first
point. I tried for ages to get my parents to use Gmail instead of Hotmail and
failed miserably. Drive would actually be _great_ for them when sharing
photos.

Agree with your other points though. The OCR and search sound like great
things so yes, you've convinced me that Dropbox has to compete on features
somehow.

------
vibrunazo
There's an update for the google docs Android app that renames it to google
drive.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.docs)

------
bryanh
Some thoughts:

It sounds like it is more of a competitor in spirit to iCloud, not Dropbox
(though, obviously, Dropbox lacking those deeper integrations is
troubling...).

100gb for $5/mo going to hurt Dropbox's margins...

Not too surprising gDrive doesn't have iOS support quite yet...

~~~
Johngibb
I'd bet they'll be approved today. I thought I saw an iPad in a screenshot.

------
Lewisham
On Mac OS X, the application doesn't respect symlinks. Does anyone have any
ideas how I can get it to auto-mirror my Documents/ directory without me
actually moving my Documents/ under the Google Drive/ directory?

~~~
demetris
Symlinks are specific to individual devices; also, symlink implementations are
different from operating system to operating system.

So, if Google Drive or Dropbox were to support that, they would have to
implement some very complex solutions (along with some probably very confusing
interaction with the user) in order to be able to sync reliably across
devices, even devices running the same operating system.

You can always[1] move your Documents inside the Google Drive folder, and then
put a symlink at the place Documents were.

[1] I haven’t tried this with Google Drive yet but I suppose it should work.
It is what I do with Dropbox, in Linux and in Windows. It works fine.

~~~
Lewisham
This appears to have worked; my CPU is going crazy from GDrive activity, which
I am guessing is some pre-processing compression step from GDrive before
upload.

I am marginally more worried about whether the same reasons that GDrive didn't
work right with a symlink inside it will result in other apps not working
right with Documents being the symlink itself. We'll see, I suppose...

------
emp_
I think this shows a massive change in direction with Google in the last
years, when GMail was introduced it came with that "Holy shit that is a lot of
space" while every other webmail was offering 10-500MB accounts, they came
with BOOM! 5GB and growing.

Now they are simply matching the competition with the same features with the
"..but it's from Google" attached to it, which is similar to what Microsoft
did with Hotmail after Gmail exploded.

Ninja edit*: talking about the entry plan (free)

One might argue that you do that when you need new users (they don't), but it
becomes more reactive than innovative in the end.

~~~
cryptoz
> every other webmail was offering 10-500MB accounts, they came with BOOM! 5GB
> and growing.

At the time, I think Hotmail offered 2MB (free). Google upped the game to 1GB.

~~~
aleyan
That is correct. A few months prior to gmail announcement hotmail lowered
their free offering from 5 MB or 6 MB to 2 MB.

------
TomGullen
Wow it's cheap, I was looking at it thinking $5 per month for 20gb, that's
pretty competitive. Then I saw it was $5 per year! I guess they have the
infrastructure to do this and still make profit.

~~~
mhb
Where do you see that? It says _25GB for $2.49/month_ \- which is still great.

~~~
bcherry
(nevermind: they were apparently just slow to update their purchase page. The
base price is now $2.50/mo for 25GB)

<https://accounts.google.com/b/0/PurchaseStorage>

This is linked from the Google Drive app icon in the OS X system tray as "buy
more storage".

''' Purchase additional storage

Google storage is shared between Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Docs.
You get extra space in all these services, in addition to your current free
quota. Learn more Select a plan:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)

80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)

200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)

400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)

1 TB ($256.00 USD per year) Need even more storage?

Buy 20 GB for $5.00 per year

Store up to 10000 photos from a 5MP camera. Your new plan will automatically
renew each year, but you can disable auto-renewal at any time by returning to
this page and choosing the free plan. We will contact you 30 days prior to
renewal.

Please allow up to 24 hours for your new storage amount to appear in all
services. Learn more '''

~~~
camiller
When I following the link you posted I get the new pricing page. It is just
taking them awhile to propagate the stuff to all their servers. Give it
another ten-twenty min and try again.

------
philfreo
Remember when Gmail launched and it was like 10-100 more free space than other
similar services?

I was hoping Google would have done that here, but rather it still feels like
they are trying to play catch up.

~~~
TillE
Their free tier is unremarkable, but their pricing for upgrades is very
aggressive. 100 GB for $5/month? Yes please.

I think a lot of people who only use free Google stuff will now start paying
them a bit of money for this service.

------
brainless
Will Google Drive Apps be limited to Chrome? Can anyone confirm if there is
any way to run them on other browsers?

If not, then popularity of Drive Apps mean will make other browsers become
less useful. There are many SMBs or individuals who would probably shift to
Drive Apps for many day to day tasks and use mostly Chrome for that.

This clearly mentions only Chrome:
[https://developers.google.com/drive/apps_overview#installing...](https://developers.google.com/drive/apps_overview#installing_a_drive_app)

------
PaperclipTaken
To me Drive feels like another part of Google's push to get everything
integrated into one easy environment. The end goal is (potentially) noble, but
I feel like they are trying too hard to push products out too fast, and a lot
of the releases they are making feel quite forced. I don't think that Google
and the Google userbase is ready for something like this, and even if this is
a really good product I see it failing just like many of Google's other recent
products.

------
jamesu
Does anyone find the sharing to be awkward? For instance, i shared a photo and
noticed it took quite a while to load for someone not signed in since lots of
redirection was going on. I also shared a folder of pictures, but they simply
appeared as a file listing with no thumbnail view despite thumbnail view being
an option in the normal interface.

Really, the interface seems a bit plain for now. Hope they improve upon it
soon.

------
alberth
Question...

Does the "GDrive for Businesses" not allow for a shared corporate folder?

[https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.htm...](https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.html#drive)

This seems odd because if you're a business, that would exactly be your need.

I hope I'm wrong, otherwise I'll continue to use my Dropbox for Teams.

<https://www.dropbox.com/teams>

~~~
drewjoh
You can share folders between users in a Google Apps account. You just have to
pay for each user to have the needed space to store the folder(s).

If you're thinking along the lines of "buy 100GB for all 20 users in my
account to share for $5/month"... then no. You can't do that.

------
nixarn
Apparently they've changed their pricing :(

<http://i.imgur.com/hLreQ.png>

I want to be able to pay per year, not per month.

------
goronbjorn
The price of cloud storage in the long run is $0, and we're approaching that
point very quickly. UX, not storage space, is going to win.

------
libraryatnight
On the upgrade storage page it tells me how much space I use across Google
products, which includes Picassa. With the inclusion of Web Store apps, one of
the first available being Pixlr, I'm curious if Drive is going to make Picassa
obsolete?

It seems like applications working with Drive would eventually replace all of
Picassa's functionality.

------
adam-f
300 comments and not one mention of megaupload.

Fascinating.

~~~
sleighboy
You're not alone.

------
brlewis
"Drive is also an open platform"

Working with select third-party developers does not make something an open
platform. A documented API makes something an open platform. Even a command-
line client for a popular web-server operating system makes something an open
platform. Google Drive is not an open platform yet.

~~~
andrenotgiant
Here's the API <https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/>

~~~
brlewis
Thank you, that helps. It would have been nice for Google to link to it in
their announcement.

------
urjitbhatia
What do these hardware control permissions mean?

"take pictures and videos Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the
camera. This allows the app at any time to collect images the camera is
seeing."

Doesn't this language bypass the point that the images/videos can only by
captured when the 'user' initiates the camera app?

------
fsckin
Pricing is pretty darn good.

Any of these plans add 25GB on a non-Google Apps (just guessing, they like to
screw us) Gmail Account which spills over to Picasa.

I just might switch from a Free Dropbox to a paid Google Drive, despite them
treating me like a business because I want to use my own domains.

------
LyleK
Sounds like a good start, but not a replacement for SugarSync. You have to put
everything in their special Google Drive folder, can't sync existing folders.
So I can't use it to back up configuration files that need to stay in their
own directories.

------
bo1024
Haven't seen anything on the key question here for me ... how are they
monetizing this?

I'd rather not upload a ton of personal data to Google until I know how
they're making money off of it. (Do they plan to integrate your documents into
your search results?)

~~~
folktheory
They "monetize" it by charging money for use of the service.

~~~
raldi
It's so crazy it just might work.

~~~
marcusf
I predict several Techcrunch headlines on this newfound "payment" option
disrupting ad-financed services across the globe.

------
sachinag
I did a quick blog post with charts and comparisons to not only Dropbox but
all the other major players: <http://www.sachinagarwal.com/google-drive-
charts>

------
ChrisArchitect
Seems like inherently, they have always been going after Dropbox, Evernote,
whatever. It's the very nature of the overarching idea of Google Docs.
Everything is a doc. And all these 'features' are natural parts of the system.

------
andrewfelix
No one seems to be talking about the individual file size limits? I couldn't
find if there were limit on individual file sizes. I have huge ISO files which
have been an issue with other online storage services in the past.

Any ideas?

------
spinchange
Hopefully they'll fix sharing a public collection in Docs now. I have not been
able to send a link to a docs collection that someone without a Google account
can open and see in its entirety, like, since forever.

------
thekevan
Am I mistaken or did I see something which said I could buy a 80gigs of
storage for $20/yr while the app was installing. Now that I go back to look
for it, all I see are the same prices as published in stories.

------
EREFUNDO
I wonder how insync ( <https://www.insynchq.com/> ) will adapt to this launch
of Google Drive since they specialize on syncing googledocs.

------
epicviking
I'm curious how this will work with google play music. if we can now upload
songs through drive instead of that terrible slow desktop uploader, spotify
may have just lost a customer...

------
kin
What's the memory footprint like? I remember giving Microsoft Mesh a try since
it offered 3GBs more than Dropbox. Goodness that thing had quadruple the
footprint of Dropbox.

------
drcube
So if I upload all my music to Google Drive, and let my friends access it...
will the FBI send a paramilitary team to confiscate Google's servers at
gunpoint?

------
tlogan
I just installed.

And it seems like I cannot edit Google Docs using MSWord/OpenOffice on my
computer... I though that is point of GDrive. Am I missing something?

~~~
davidwurtz
Google docs are meant to be edited on drive.google.com

But if you drag MSWord docs into your local google drive folder, it will
upload and sync to all your devices.

~~~
tlogan
Now I understand why Drew and company are not worried at all...

------
antihero
What would be awesome is if this integrates with Google Music and Google Music
worked in the UK. They are our files, let us listen to them.

------
Tomis02
I don't understand the name, I first thought it was a competitor for Nokia
Drive. It doesn't have anything to do with driving, has it?

------
kin
Do we know if Google ever tried to acquire Dropbox or was it just Apple? Sorry
in advance if I'm just really out of the loop.

------
euroclydon
Any idea of the latency for HTTP requests? I wonder if it could be nice for
storing and serving static resources.

------
dhconnelly
Integration with Docs. This is fantastic.

~~~
pdubs
I'd rather it didn't by default. Now I have a ton of random docs from over the
years synced...

~~~
libraryatnight
Same here. Really annoying, actually. My docs is fairly well organized but
there's also tons of random crap in there from over the years.

------
chintan
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to
go thermonuclear war on this."

s/Android/Dropbox

~~~
jrockway
Then he died.

------
iunk
Will it check if the file was already uploaded before so it does not upload it
again? like Dropbox

------
puffyresearch
What do you think of the naming? At first I thought it was an API for the
self-driving cars...

------
Lockyy
When are they going to get a customer service department that is easy to
contact and talk to? They have so many service based projects going on that
need the ability to talk to a representative to get things fixed and there
still isn't a way, that I know of, to contact them.

~~~
Lockyy
Am I wrong? If I am can you correct me? It would be nice to be corrected if
I'm wrong instead of just being down-voted.

------
sskates
Is there anyone who's actually used it and can comment on how good it is?

------
freshrap6
I wonder how affects those of us who pay extra for more space already?

------
treelovinhippie
New launches are never available for Google Apps domains. Fark.

------
wildmXranat
And the price is great! I will most certainly give it a shot.

------
mrbill
Can't use the Drive app on the Mac through a SOCKS proxy. 8-(

------
jokull
Anyone see anything about selective sync in the clients?

~~~
fishbacon
In preferences I see "Sync only some folders to this computer" as an option.

Don't see an option to move the folder though, that's annoying.

------
EREFUNDO
It's now a price war! good for consumers.....

------
lalmalang
wow. i didnt realize what an aesthetic achievement the dropbox sync checkmarks
were until i saw the google drive ones...

~~~
bunnyhero
Now I'm curious. Do you have a screenshot? (I don't have Drive yet)

EDIT: never mind, I can see them in the graphic on the announcement blog post.
[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OmO4AEPzKVE/T5bIDxKcD6I/AAAAAAAAJH...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OmO4AEPzKVE/T5bIDxKcD6I/AAAAAAAAJHI/msRIMa4kQpI/s1600/FINAL%2BFINAL%2BOGB%2Bblog%2Bpost%2Bscreenshot.png)

------
dsirijus
Not available for Business. What the hell?

------
dillona
I truly thought I'd never see the day....

------
studio816
What's with the recycling bin icon, ew.

------
BlaineLight
How is this different from Google Docs?

------
bicknergseng
What does this mean for Dropbox?

------
mmmmbop
Yeah I think I'll pass. SkyDrive gives me 25GB and their "access any file on
your computer (even those outside of your skydrive folder) from skydrive.com"
feature is amazing.

Plus like someone else already mentioned, having GDrive download hyperlinks is
subpar imo. I'd rather get the doc or xls back, edit it on a client, and have
it re-upload and convert to gdoc format.

SkyDrive: 25gb (or 7 which is still > 5), cheaper plans, you can access your
entire computer from skydrive.com, and it already has iphone/ipad clients.

I really don't see a reason why anyone should use GDrive over SkyDrive unless
they were a _heavy_ gdocs user.

~~~
skinnymuch
A lot of people would use Google over Microsoft because of the good will and
reputation Google currently holds.

~~~
skinnymuch
Not sarcastic. I personally do not like Google or their supposed morals, but
I'm not "a lot of people" :P

------
bluedanieru
This is something they could have done, and _should have done_ , eight years
ago. To suggest they are a day late and a buck short is a massive
understatement.

I'll stick with DropBox, thanks.

------
bashzor
This is the big Google Drive we've been anticipating and rumoring about for
the past 5 years? Google Docs with a different label and icon?

The icon is uninspired and un-iconic. Somehow this project looks incredibly
rushed and simplified to me, but I can't imagine how Google would ever rush
anything nor how they could have had too little time.

------
voxx
Anybody noticed how rare it is for OP to post?

His first page of submissions are mostly from 3 years ago.

~~~
Tomis02
Nobody except the people suffering from stalker syndrome.

~~~
voxx
I was curious, you pretentious fuck. :P

------
loverobots
To those expecting Dropbox to meet Google's prices, they might not be able
too. Google can easily lose a fortune in this until Dropbox and other small
players go bankrupt.

~~~
MartinCron
_Google can easily lose a fortune in this until Dropbox and other small
players go bankrupt._

This is exactly the sort of thing that draws attention from the US Department
of Justice. I don't see Google stepping under that microscope if they can at
all avoid it.

------
biopharma_guy
Is there a way to use the Google drive without installing the software onto my
computer? My employer does not allow me to install any software to the office
computer.

------
tuananh
Say hello to Google Docs+

------
solsenNet
"Let the bodies hit the Flooooooor!"

