Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204369404577211961645711988-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html

by mjfern • 14 years ago

85 57 14 years ago

online.wsj.com

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.

Shank• 14 years ago

If you pay for space upgrades then that applies to all services. I'm fairly sure the Gmail space system was related to how they stored the data, as they have the always increasing ticker. Either that or it is/was a marketing ploy.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

For reference, here is the Google storage pricing: http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

ww520• 14 years ago

Google can index and search your emails in GMail, and serve you ad. The more free storage the more emails to index. Pictures are difficult to parse and index. It's less a profit center for them.

tszming• 14 years ago

There are other costs you need to consider such as data transfer, the usage patterns of your private inbox is different from a public album.

patrickaljord• 14 years ago

Didn't you answer your own question? They know most gmail users won't use more than 1GB so it's good for marketing to offer 8GB and financially they won't waste too much money as most people won't use those 8GB. With picasa however, that limit would probably be reached quickly by most or many so it's safer for them to offer less there.

gsa• 14 years ago

Photos less than 2048x2048 in dimensions don't count towards the free limit since Google+ launched. I have always resized my photos to 1600px wide, and now my Picasa usage is very low.

patio11• 14 years ago

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.

rooshdi3• 14 years ago

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?

efsavage• 14 years ago

Aside from the other reasons mentioned here, email compresses fairly well so 8GB of email could end up using less disk than 1GB of photos (which are already compressed).

effward2• 14 years ago

Wow! This comment prompted me to check how much of my gmail storage I am using, and it made me realize that my google account through Cornell gives me 25GB of storage. Oh how I wish I could use this 25GB as cloud storage.

http://i.imgur.com/ixlZ6.png

accountoftheday• 14 years ago

Your anonymization process pairs ineffectiveness with labor-intensity astonishingly well.

mayanksinghal• 14 years ago

I think your use case is not universal. I regularly reach 80% - 90% and so do my peers. We have to regularly use findbigmail and smart-personally-defined filters to delete big and unnecessary mails.

Gmail is used as a collaboration as well as backup tool by at least a few of us. What it means is that we often tend to many attachments exceeding 10MB - and multiple versions of them. Not the most optimal usage I know, but it is very quick and convenient most users (even the not-so-technically proficient ones) are able to use it with ease.

parfe• 14 years ago

Images can't really be compressed while emails easily can. That Even if you reached 8GB of text that isn't how much storage you're taking up on their servers.

blacksmythe• 14 years ago

In addition, if you store more than 1 GB, chances are that a good fraction of that is photos emailed to multiple people, which they can store only one copy of while counting this storage against each person that leaves it on their account.

staunch• 14 years ago

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.

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

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.

pinaceae• 14 years ago

so you want iCloud for Android?

koalaman• 14 years ago

wait. Doesn't android already do those things?

revorad4• 14 years ago

Can you imagine something going wrong with your account and trying to contact Google support?

I trust Dropbox way more than Google. They know what customer service means. Google can't even spell it. They are too proud and addicted to their power.

arethuza• 14 years ago

"I trust Dropbox way more than Google."

I'd be worried about Google doing the wrong thing correctly and Dropbox doing the right thing incorrectly.

Given that, I'm not sure who I would actually trust more.

euroclydon• 14 years ago

Google has Big Table right? But do they have a distributed storage mechanism on par with S3? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

alexgartrell• 14 years ago

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System

If amazon can build it, Google can build it.

jbeda• 14 years ago

Check out Google Cloud Storage. https://developers.google.com/storage/

Proudly built in Google Seattle. We are hiring, by the way. :)

pron2• 14 years ago

Dropbox is a terrific product. Simple for absolutely anyone to use, it does one thing and does it perfectly well. But I think Dropbox as a company is indeed vulnerable. They have only the one product, as perfect as it is, and no hold on their customers. If a Dropbox clone were to appear tomorrow, transferring your files is a matter of minutes if not seconds. Thus they're posed for fierce price competition, with fast-dropping profit margins. So the name of the game will be added-value services - services that would potentially "lock-in" customers and make it harder to switch. Unfortunately, Google seems better posed for such services, but I, for one, will stick with Dropbox for now, simply because I don't want to give Google access to so much of my data (it's quite enough that they keep all my e-mail).

smh• 14 years ago

people familiar with the matter

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

jforman• 14 years ago

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."

treelovinhippie• 14 years ago

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

Strom• 14 years ago

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

bilban• 14 years ago

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

yaix• 14 years ago

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.

franze• 14 years ago

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... you should contact him for "career opportunities"

shrikant• 14 years ago

..is this a rhetorical question?

See the byline in http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-an... - Sundar Pichai is "SVP, Chrome and Apps".

SethMurphy• 14 years ago

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.

forgotAgain• 14 years ago

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.

fufulabs• 14 years ago

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

webwanderings• 14 years ago

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?

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

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.

pron2• 14 years ago

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?

Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service

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