Google Drive

https://drive.google.com/start

by Braasch • 14 years ago

275 132 14 years ago

drive.google.com

It must be crazy in the plex today. My Gmail is down, can't download canary, and this site is crazy slow to load.

ciupicri• 14 years ago

    You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video.
    Download it from Adobe.

It makes me wonder how serious is Google about WebM.

daave• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/html5

The YouTube HTML5 player is still in trial mode, just not stable enough to use on the homepage of a major product launch.

All in good time, there are definitely people at Google working on it :-)

iscrewyou2• 14 years ago

If you are one of them, let Page and his team(that would include you) know that they are doing a good job with the new direction the company is going towards.

andrewhillman• 14 years ago

Talk about cheap storage. :)

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)

zgohr• 14 years ago

Where are you seeing this? I see 25GB for $2.49 USD per month, 100GB for $4.99 USD per month, 1TB for $49.99 USD per month (and a few others) here: https://www.google.com/settings/storage/?hl=en

rewtraw• 14 years ago

Seems to have been a mistake, they already fixed the pricing.

Old: http://i.imgur.com/wq9hz.png

mladenkovacevic• 14 years ago

I just bought 80GB a few minutes before the new pricing page went up. When I go back to my Accounts page and click on Storage-More Details I see the new pricing like you, but under my 80GB at $20/year I see the following: "* Your current plan is no longer offered.Learn more"

There is nothing yet under the Learn More link, but it says that my next charge will occur next year. I hope that means old storage buyers are being grandfathered in.

Thinking about it some more, I should've gotten 200GB for $50.

glesica• 14 years ago

Anyone see any word on a Linux client? "PC and Mac" is all I can find, but "PC" usually translates to "Windows"...

diminish• 14 years ago

microsoft, canonical, apple and now google; won't any one of the bigger tech players buy dropbox instead of developing something new?

Duff• 14 years ago

The asking price is probably too insane. If Instagram is a $1B company, than what is Dropbox?

rscale• 14 years ago

Dropbox raised $250m at a (rumored) $4b valuation not long ago.

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

I hope not. Like Twitter and others before it, I think Dropbox is more likely to succeed and engender trust from users as an independent company.

Dropbox has said that unlike iCloud or SkyDrive, they're the only ones offering a truly cross-platform offering, that doesn't favor any one OS or platform over any other. Selling out to one of the big companies (except maybe Amazon/Facebook) would sacrifice that.

Not to mention, Drew Houston already turned down a 9-figure offer from Steve Jobs so I doubt he's interested in selling.

no-espam2• 14 years ago

But why? I'm not loyal to Dropbox. Competition is good for the rest of us. I get 25GB free from SkyDrive. I hope the others follow suit.

jlarocco3• 14 years ago

I hope not. I don't trust Microsoft, Canonical, Apple, or Google to provide cloud storage.

DropBox works great for me on OSX, Windows, and a couple of Linux variants. I just can't see Microsoft, Canonical or Apple going out of their way to make things work well across platforms.

And Google Drive probably ties into Google+, which kills it for me.

tomkarlo5• 14 years ago

Curious: why would you trust Dropbox or another small provider any more/less than Microsoft, Apple or Google?

If say, Microsoft bought Dropbox, would you then no longer trust them?

Interested in the reasoning here.

DonnyV• 14 years ago

The way I see it Dropbox made a BIG mistake not selling to Apple. They have now been marginalized by Google Drive. Dropbox is expensive and doesn't offer any of the great features of Google Drive....there done.

no-espam2• 14 years ago

Confusing. It says upgrade to 25GB for less than $2.50/month then it says 20GB for $5.00/year. You would think with Google's budget they would have some person read the front page and the pricing page.

twog• 14 years ago

Google & Apple make outstanding marketing videos. They are routinely some of the best I see in any industry, and the clear leaders in the tech industry.

The only "startup" I have seen that rivals their quality of marketing videos is Square. Does anyone know how much producing video like this costs?

johnhartigun• 14 years ago

The Google Drive video is too professional and kind of boring.

JoblessWonder• 14 years ago

The pure production costs (Animator + Voice Over) aren't going to be high. Anywhere from $1k to $5k depending on how much you outsource and how far away you outsource it.

The ability of a marketing department/agency to distill the product, it's benefits, how it relates to the brand and why you need it is something you can't really quantify. If you watch Mad Men think of the effort that goes into a pitch meeting. That is what you pay for. And that can cost a lot.

kul• 14 years ago

I actually contacted the guy who made Square's videos and it's in the tens of thousands of dollars. My memory is hazy but it wouldn't surprise me if it's around $50k+. The videos more than pay for themselves, however.

tomkarlo5• 14 years ago

The Square video (and many of the ones in the same style) are by this guy: http://www.businessinsider.com/adam-lisagor-lonelysandwich-2...

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

I agree Google has been making some amazing video ads in the past year or so.

ceejayoz2• 14 years ago

The Google Docs integration is disappointing. Just JSON files that open up Google Docs in your browser, nothing useful to point Time Machine or some sort of backup script at.

mshafrir• 14 years ago

When I saw my Docs start syncing in, I thought it meant I would be able to work on them offline. I was also disappointed, but I'm sure this functionality will roll out down the road.

ceejayoz2• 14 years ago

You can enable offline access in Google Docs. Backup's the issue for me, though.

ja27• 14 years ago

I was disappointed too. It's a glorified bookmark manager. I'd have thought it would at least give me csv and rtf locally or an XML format.

jxi3• 14 years ago

There is an option to enable accessing your files offline.

peedy2• 14 years ago

However it is now easier to move your files in appropriate collections and remove the unwanted files compared to the webinterface.

philp• 14 years ago

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?

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

If true, that would be a huge omission.

I've symlinked my ~/Documents folder into my Dropbox folder and now I rarely manually put anything into ~/Dropbox.

I wonder if it's because they know people use Dropbox this way, but they want you to put your documents into Google Docs directly?

Lewisham• 14 years ago

I have the same problem. I've pinged my friends at Google to see if a feature request can be put in.

It's really annoying that this use case wasn't thought about.

molecule-eye• 14 years ago

Symlinks are ignored. On Mac, aliases are synced as files, but the files themselves aren't followed. Huge disappointment and deal-breaker for me as well.

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

Is it just me or is this landing page pretty terribly designed (other than the video)?

If I didn't already know what the product is, I would have no idea what I'm looking at. Is it a cyberlocker? Is it a Dropbox clone? Is it a social file editor?

Heck, the landing page could almost just be describing the previous Google Docs functionality.

The most innovative features, OCR and image recognition, are buried away with almost no description of just how useful they might be (privacy issues aside). The file revisions feature is sorely lacking in detail.

Also, the amount of white space feels excessive. Was a second page for features even necessary or couldn't that have just all been on the main page?

I'm sure the product is great and all, but this page is completely useless to send to less technical friends or family members.

Edit: If you want to compare it to Google's other downloadable software landing pages:

http://google.com/chrome

http://google.com/earth

http://google.com/toolbar

http://google.com/quicksearchbox

http://picasa.google.com

http://sketchup.google.com

huggyface• 14 years ago

The landing page seems perfectly fine to me, and adequately describes the functionality of the service.

adrianp• 14 years ago

It's funny that in the old Google Docs I was able to upload documents with no issues in any browser/OS, but it seems that in Drive I cannot do it using Opera on Linux (but I can using Chrome). Also, the way in which shared documents have been handled in the transition is just plain stupid.

Kudos• 14 years ago

I never find it strange when Opera doesn't work. It's not Opera's fault, web developers generally don't care about it.

plg• 14 years ago

2MB file size limit???

CountSessine2• 14 years ago

Really? I didn't see that.

Nevermind. Looks like I'm sticking with dropbox.

singingwolfboy• 14 years ago

Looks like the file cap is actually 4MiB, based on my testing. Still way too small.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

How can that be? They were just priding themselves on "even the big ones"

sonar_un• 14 years ago

I ran into similar problems. a 32MB file would stop the syncing service completely and not resume.

CountSessine2• 14 years ago

The icon looks a bit like a recycling symbol. This is not a good metaphor for cloud storage.

And no linux client.

untouchable• 14 years ago

No linux client turned me off of full adoption (especially when dropbox does support linux)

lomegor• 14 years ago

While Dropbox does support Linux, I could only get the client to work on the Ubuntu distro. Not saying that Google Drive is better (they don't even have a client), but that Dropbox Linux support is not so good.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

It shouldn't be complicated to write a FUSE client, should it?

nubela• 14 years ago

No Linux support? sad face.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Probably supports Linux server side :P

dgurney• 14 years ago

A key differentiator here vs. Dropbox that I think people are overlooking is the fact that you can actually edit your files and collaborate easily. The transition to cloud-based apps is underway, and Dropbox -- in this respect -- is about to be stuck in the past.

dkrich2• 14 years ago

I disagree and I have no affiliation with Dropbox or have any vested interest in their success.

I just tend to think that the optimal cloud solution is as close to invisible as possible while letting people use whichever software tools they need. I don't really see any single entity owning the software and the storage because no single entity can own the collaboration tools. I view collaboration and syncing as two distinct business lines without a whole lot of interdependence. Personally I use Google docs once in a blue moon, and even when I do, I don't see how Google Drive makes that process any easier.

It may be that I just don't understand the product, but I don't think this will be any more successful than its competitors except for the fact that, when compared to Dropbox, it is substantially cheaper. But then again, Dropbox may be able to parter with Amazon to keep Google out of the space as much as possible and keep costs down.

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

I think you just nailed something exactly on the head that I've had a hard time describing to people.

For me, the fundamental problem with a service like Google Docs is that it is the ONLY way I can edit a document.

Whereas on my computer, I can open a .doc file (synced with Dropbox) in Word, TextEdit, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, or just about any other document editor. Doubly so for more platform-agnostic files (e.g. txt, jpg, pdf, etc).

(This is also why, unlike Steve Jobs, I hope files and the file system never die.)

angryasian• 14 years ago

you can download the files and use whatever you want. Its just lower barrier, in terms of collaboration and sharing, getting people productive, etc. I know for example some docs created in Windows office suite vs Mac office suite, don't work well when editing on different platforms along with open office on linux. Even differentiators of file types like docx vs doc have issues.

bretthellman• 14 years ago

It seems to be disabled for google apps?

tree_of_item• 14 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3884918

rjsamson• 14 years ago

I think something needs to be updated in Apps admin panel - once I logged into the admin panel it was available.

pgambling2• 14 years ago

"Your Google Drive is not ready yet" :(

bvi• 14 years ago

Frustrating, isn't it? I'd have loved to give it a shot, to see how it compares to Dropbox.

NZ_Matt• 14 years ago

I'm also seeing this. Is it not available internationally yet or are they just rolling it out slowly?

pgambling2• 14 years ago

I'm in Houston, TX. My guess is a slow roll out, probably over a day or so.

Zhenya2• 14 years ago

I wish I could select on android which folder I wanted Synced. Right now I had to manually share the photo folder from my gallery. (I dont want to use google+ photos)

Zhenya2• 14 years ago

I am going to try and build this with Drive API

https://developers.google.com/drive/get_started

sjaakkkkk• 14 years ago

Anybody an idea whether it can hurt to put my Dropbox folder in the GDrive folder? That way I'd have a double backup for files in my Dropbox folder.

trustfundbaby• 14 years ago

I'm curious to know how many people like this trend of having to watch a video when you get to a landing page. Its showing up in more and more places, and I personally dislike it (I don't want to load a video and watch a clip, if I can quickly scan text and images and figure out if I should continue), but I wanted to know what other people thought.

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

I like both, personally.

Ideally, I want to see a few images to get an idea of what the product is. If I'm interested, I'll watch the video to actually see how it works.

There are things you notice in a video you'd never grasp just from a few pictures, just like how a few pictures can sometimes explain things much better than a lot of words.

grinich• 14 years ago

Text is high bandwidth, but videos are much better for communicating emotion.

timwiseman2• 14 years ago

I am fully with you. As a general rule, I process text much faster (and more selectively) than I can process a video.

The only time I prefer video is when it is something that truly benefits from being demonstrated in a way that is cumbersome to describe in words. Working with software is almost always best described in words with some pictures, but I found videos extremely helpful in origami.

jwr• 14 years ago

I rarely watch the videos. Life is too short. If I can learn about the service/product by reading, that's fine, if not — I'll just abandon the page. If the service/product is any good, it will come back to me sooner or later via friends' recommendations.

gbog2• 14 years ago

Same here, rarely watch videos, but not because life is too short, because video are very intrusive. I need to put headphones, it may download slowly, I have to focus on somebody talking to me, often with a very weird accent, in a language that is not my mother tongue. Moreover I am in China and may have to fire my VPN, switch on the proxy, all this because some guys decided videos were more than text.

dunk010• 14 years ago

It's a 1 minute video so it probably took you longer to post this comment than to watch the thing.

robmcm• 14 years ago

I normally go to wikipedia for a description of a service or product rather than sift through all the marketing BS that's normally plastered over a website.

jawngee• 14 years ago

So now they have your social network, your search history, your email ... and now your files? I can't see how that could possibly go wrong.

dmix• 14 years ago

Also notably, your wallet.

tedsuo• 14 years ago

Don't forget your phone, and eventually, your car!!! I give them points for being ambitious.

Bapabooiee• 14 years ago

To be fair, file-uploading has been part of Google Docs for a while now (I've been using it to upload encrypted backups). The only difference now is that there's a desktop client and an SDK.

yalogin• 14 years ago

The biggest things here are the OCR, image recognition and (hence deeper) search feature for your files. It would be really tough for Dropbox or any other competitor to match these. The Google drive also seems to be available on all platforms so looks like a very good option.

timwiseman2• 14 years ago

"The Google drive also seems to be available on all platforms"

Not yet. There is no broad based Linux support yet (it supports Android, which is technically Linux, but no Linux Desktop distro is supported) and iOS support is still in the works.

joshe• 14 years ago

Evernote already does a great job with ocr for searching images (along with your notes).

ozataman• 14 years ago

The best thing about this is that it will finally force Dropbox to offer more storage at a cheaper price point. $200 bucks for 100GB of personal storage per year? I've long thought it's ridiculously high for mass adoption and so many more would be using it if the price was a bit more reasonable.

For me:

1. I need much more space than 100GB - I'd ideally like a TB+ on the cloud.

2. The price has to be more acceptable. Say the cost of a TB hard drive on an annual basis. I'm not even going to talk about the likely $1000+ bill for a TB of space at the current price point.

3. I have to admit that Dropbox is pretty cool when it comes to a smooth, painless experience.

luser001• 14 years ago

Agreed about high dropbox pricing. But it isn't too bad imho.

There are three inter-related concepts: backup (mirror of your hdd), archiving (extension of your hdd), sync (subset of files on multiple devices) and sharing.

But if you're ok with using different services for different purposes, you can easily get what you want.

To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage.

For backup, pay $50/yr to Backblaze.

If you try to use a service optimized for sharing and sync (Dropbox) for archival and backup, you're going to experience friction.

Just my two cents.

elithrar• 14 years ago

> To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage.

Note that Flickr will only archive certain types of media—you can't store your RAW files or other related stuff (presets, actions) with them. I believe Smugmug and a few of the other services do this, though.

soupboy• 14 years ago

I get the feeling that this is also going to force Amazon to lower their S3 prices. To store 100GB on S3's standard storage costs around $12/month right now [http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/]. Even if Dropbox were getting the best price on that page, it would still cost them $3.7/month to store 100GB.

encoderer• 14 years ago

AWS prices are negotiable. They're certainly getting a better price than what's on that page.

samstave• 14 years ago

It would be interesting if you could map an S3 drive locally - then do a custom install of dropbox and point it at the S3 mapping on whatever machine you have then you'd be using dropbox to sync to S3

zavulon3• 14 years ago

With Google's legendary customer service, it's only a matter of time until someone gets their account locked, loses all their files and can't get them from Google because there's no way to speak an actual person.

VikingCoder4• 14 years ago

Isn't the whole point of this to synch your files to your local computer?

zavulon3• 14 years ago

The point is to sync so if your local computer fails you can retrieve them. A situation could occur where your hard drive fails AND you're locked out of your Google Drive account.

peedy2• 14 years ago

You don't get a copy of the files on your computer which are in google docs format.

jxi3• 14 years ago

Has anyone actually gotta their gmail account locked for a non-malicious reason? I can understand your AdSense account or G+ account locked because those have some various more strict rules, but I've never heard of anyone getting their gmail/calendar/docs account locked.

Their automated recovery systems are good enough such that you don't need an actual person. It nags you all the time to enter a phone number and recovery email, and reminds you of the recovery email from time to time.

conradfr• 14 years ago

Yes, I got my Youtube account locked, so that locked my Google account and I couldn't access my mails.

ed209• 14 years ago

there are cases of people losing access to gmail because they didn't add their real name into Google+ which is a pretty trivial action.

the problem is that essential work products like gmail and drive are bundled with social elements like g+ or youtube which I'm starting to dislike more and more.

shuzchen• 14 years ago

I like it. Well, I can't use it currently (my drive "isn't ready yet") but I've wanted a more feature-ful Dropbox[1]. With Google killing off tons of projects I love (latest being Picasa for linux, sad face) it's nice to see they're adding cool things in the meantime.

[1] That is, Dropbox's philosophy is to create something dead simple that an idiot can use, whereas I suspect Google's product will be laden with options and knobs. I don't knock on Dropbox - I'm constantly recommending it to people that aren't tech-savvy (and it's one of the few things they understand and start using quickly), but I personally like those knobs and levers. Am I the only one here that doesn't think they're direct competition with each other? They're in the same space and all but I think they're meant for different niches.

tiziano88• 14 years ago

picasa for linux was just a bundle of wine and picasa for windows, you can easily replicate this setup yourself.

sirwanqutbi• 14 years ago

Why is Google immune to Anti-competition laws?

tjmc• 14 years ago

Anti-competition laws (in the US at least) only take effect where a company 1. has a monopoly or near-monopoly in a market and then 2. abuses that position to keep out or disadvantage competitors.

The laws don't apply to Google here because there's significant competition (SkyDrive, iCloud, Dropbox and others) so no monopoly. And Google is also fine in markets like search where they are the dominant player unless they start doing dumb things like penalising companies for advertising on other search engines.

thedangler• 14 years ago

I tried it quickly. And couple things I have grip with. 1. I Synced my folders and a couple files showed up. I deleted the files I didn't want in my google drive on the computer, and they were removed from google drive.

2. I disconnected, And when I tried to sync back up it wanted my Google drive folder to be empty. It wanted to re-sync everything from the online Drive account. It wouldn't pick up where it left off.

I stopped using it right away.

That was my experience. I'm sure they will fix it. Unless I'm using it wrong.

jarsj• 14 years ago

It's strange that the top comments here are blasting Google for things we couldn't care less about.

I think it's awesome. Especially the search integration and ability to build apps. Dropbox is dead.

inglondon• 14 years ago

When running the Google Drive OSX application the CPU goes into overdrive while syncing my local files to the Google servers and pushes the CPU temperature to around 100° Celsius. Is anyone else experiencing the same issues?

nextstep• 14 years ago

Apparently Google Drive isn't everywhere I want to be; it's not "ready for my account" yet. Is it really that hard for Google to make this available for everyone who wants it right away? How many people are trying to do this on opening day?

twodayslate• 14 years ago

I still want to be able to sync any folder - not just a gDrive or a dropbox folder.

conradev• 14 years ago

The more I use it, the more I see it as a Dropbox clone. Not just the exact same feature-wise, but also technology-wise..

Google Drive's Mac client is written in Python, just like Dropbox's, for example.

alastair• 14 years ago

It seems along with this announcement google have revised their storage pricing. On the old scheme I could get 20GB for $5/year, now 25GB is ~$30/year (600% increase) -

http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

ramblerman• 14 years ago

I wonder what this will mean for dropbox. I certainly like the micro-like pricing starting at 2.50 a month.

As a statisfied dropbox user, with only ~200mb used, I don't need to pay for the service. Yet I recently wanted to show my support by taking their lowest possible plan. (I thought this would put me back 15-30 dollars a year).

Yet the lowest thing they offer is 9.99 a month. I found that suprising

douglee650• 14 years ago

at first i was like, only 5gb free, what happened to massive leapfrogs goog. then i was like 100gb for 4.99/month F yeah america.

aganek• 14 years ago

The next big stage of cloud storage is integration. Integration into 3rd party apps. Integration deep into devices (iCloud for iOS and Google Drive for Android). This was a "must" for Google for Android to remain relevant.

dpres• 14 years ago

How is Google Drive different from the way Google Docs is meant to be used? Seems like Google Drive is Google Docs with a new name and an intro video.

Google Drive

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