
Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service - mjfern
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204369404577211961645711988-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html
======
staunch
This should be interesting. All Google needs to do for Drive to be "better"
than Dropbox is create a clone, integrate it with my existing Google account,
and have higher storage limits.

I'd say it's just as likely as not that they'll manage to create something
worse, even with the with Dropbox as a nearly static target for 5 years.

Somehow Big Co's almost always manage to screw up even the relatively easy
things.

~~~
nextparadigms
I'd like the Google Drive to back-up my Android apps, images, videos,
settings, Contacts, passwords and other data, so when I change phones or
install a custom ROM, I can restore my phone 100%. They already do this with
Chrome. I'd like to be able to do the same with Android.

~~~
koalaman
wait. Doesn't android already do those things?

~~~
nextparadigms
Only some of them, not all.

~~~
cryptoz
Which ones are you missing? Google backs up all of the things you mentioned
for me on my phone.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Doesn't backup my files on my SD card and sync with my other devices (Macbook,
etc) like Dropbox does.

------
BonoboBoner
I never understood why Google would give me 8GB of free email storage (of
which I use less than 1 GB), but limits my picasa storage to 1024 MB. They
need to homogenize their product lineup and just give me an amount N of
storage and let me decide how I want to use that.

~~~
patio11
1) Because typical user behavior for email will require megs, not gigs. I've
used apps for my business for five years running and only barely crest a gig.

2) Because Gmail's main economic contribution to Google isn't the advertising,
it is in signing people up for Google accounts, just like Yahoo Mail's main
purpose is to stickily draw people to the Yahoo front page. After you're
logged in on Google, your rate of searching goes up, compared to otherwise
demographically similar people who are not logged in. (Same if you use Chrome
or the Google toolbar, by the way.) Google likes when you search because
Google is a multinational advertising company and about two thirds of their
inventory by revenues is on their own search result pages.

3) Separately from the totally rational reasons to prefer Gmail (a
strategically important service with negligible marginal costs) over Picasa (a
strategically marginal service with relatively high marginal costs), Google is
also a big multinational corporation, and internal politics still happen
there. There is a political angle to any project getting additional resources.
Picasa is not politically favored compared to, I don't know, that
I-can't-believe-its-not-Facebook that they launched recently.

~~~
rooshdi
Just because it's more profitable for them, doesn't make it right to users.
Many people would like the flexibility of managing the extra space Google says
we have in our Gmail account, so why not put people over profits for once and
do what's best for users?

~~~
pilif
Google does provide you with more flexibility of storage allocation once you
purchase additional storage. At that point all services share the same quota
and you get full flexibility.

As such, see this split in case of unpaid accounts as another incentive for
people to upgrade. As you don't pay anything, it's well within Google's right
to optimize their offering to keep their costs as low as possible (ie.
limiting picasa storage) and get the maximum marketing value (i.e practically
unlimited mail storage).

~~~
rooshdi
They have the right to offer anything they want, but ignoring users who want
more control over their supposed Gmail space just isn't putting the user
first, it's putting profits first. But I guess greed isn't evil, right?

~~~
mediaman
You can complain about resource limitations on a free offering from a publicly
traded company if you'd like. Or, if you'd like to be treated like an actual
customer, you can become one, by paying for storage.

~~~
rooshdi
Oh yea, I forgot we only exist if we pull out our damn wallet in this corrupt
capitalist society.

------
yaix
Is "Drive" really a good name for storage? Especially if another branch of the
company is developing technology for cars and another branch is developing
traffic maps and traffic reporting technology.

------
SethMurphy
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. This pretty much sums up why I will
continue to use, and pay, for my Dropbox service for documents. I do not see
how integration with Google's other services is a useful thing. They are just
files. Now my photos and music, well Google already does that.

The good news is that Dropbox should integrate search soon. They will have to
in order to keep up. Competition is a good thing for consumers.

------
fufulabs
Store the rest of your files with the biggest ad company? If you want ads to
be uncomfortably relevant to you, go ahead.

------
treelovinhippie
About time! I've always thought Google could surely offer ridiculously large
storage limits for free. Same goes with cloud hosting.

~~~
Strom
Google App Engine offers 6GB for free, not exactly ridiculously large.

------
pron
BTW, the article mentions Dropbox raising $250 million. If I'm not mistaken,
youtube had only raised about a tenth of that by the time it was acquired, and
they had to stream videos, and I guess storage (and bandwidth) was more
expensive back then. Does anyone know what Dropbox does with so much money?

------
bilban
I'd use them immediately given command line tools, and open protocols/apis.

------
franze
so whats Sundar Pichai - the guy who convinced goolges top management in 2008
to kill - the ready for launch - GDrive because files are "deprecated",
"ungoogly" and a "thing of the past" doing nowadays?

according to his linkedin profile
[http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&authType=na...](http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&authType=name&authToken=VVYk&locale=en_US&pvs=pp&trk=ppro_viewmore)
you should contact him for "career opportunities"

~~~
shrikant
..is this a rhetorical question?

See the byline in [http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-
an...](http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-android.html)
\- Sundar Pichai is "SVP, Chrome and Apps".

------
smh
_people familiar with the matter_

This peculiar phrase appears four times in the article. Is it journalist-code
for something?

~~~
jforman
Yes, it's code for a source who is "on background" or of similar attribution
status. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_sourcing> under "Speaking
terms."

------
joejohnson
Maybe they will allow users to use public key encryption (like mozy does). Oh
wait, Google makes all of their money by reading our documents/emails and
watching all of our online behavior. I'm sure this service will be no
different.

~~~
bryogenic
If you truly have a privacy concern just throw a TrueCrypt file store inside
of your cloud storage. I do this already in dropbox and it works well.

~~~
joejohnson
Yes, I do that for certain files in my Dropbox. But opening one of these files
requires opening truecrypt, mounting the file and then opening the files
inside the mounted drive. I wish that I could have this security, but be able
to open an encrypted file in one-click. This could be possible if I were able
set my own private key, and then the Dropbox (or Google Drive) client would
encrypt _all_ of my data as they transfer it to their servers.

------
webwanderings
The only way Google can win over competition now, is if they provide unlimited
storage (remember when Gmail first launched?). Also, can they also announce
the shutdown of G+ while they're at launching of a new service?

------
forgotAgain
I'm not saying that Google is untrustworthy but with the way they've been
acting the past few years the idea of giving them my files feels a bit creepy.

 _Eric Schmidt: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place._

Edited to add: I think it is preferable to spread information among service
providers rather than concentrate it in one provider's hands. Google already
has my search and email information. I do not think it advisable to add
information from files to that.

