"Google One" suffers from designer in a box syndrome.
It's probably a great internal name - hey, we've been providing storage for photos, email, docs, drive, and more, for over a decade, and we've finally integrated that storage into one space, so let's call it Google one! It's a great name - simple and powerful, symbolizes the effort and direction we've taken in the past 5-10 years of integrating our consumer, day to day products.
However, outside of the Google box, no one understands or cares what they've been doing. "Google one" sounds like... nothing. "What is it???" is an extremely appropriate response.
Maybe in the future it will come to symbolize all the services of Google, available in one centralized location, allowing for future consumers to easily access all of google services without separate pay schemes, storage, or
other infrastructure, and make it a 1 stop shop for your services needs, common or obscure.
But right now, the copy and landing page are way off the messaging mark.
I wish for once they would really offer a unified storage-solution. But Yet it's all just a colelction of different storages with different interfaces, rules and so on. Google Drive has integrateion into all their services somehow, and Google Photos has some bad integration into Google Drive. But what about Google Books? Google Music? Google Mail? Youtube and all the other stuff they have? At best they have some import/export-functionalitity, not a real "One-for-all" type of filemanaging-solution.
I haven't tested Google One yet, but it doesn;t seem to change anything there, just offering more space for them all.
> "Google one" sounds like... nothing. "What is it???"
It sounds precisely like Amazon's "Prime" brand, and it's no coincidence. It's a sunk-cost feature to convince you to come back (like membership shopping clubs - Costco, Sams). Unfortunately I don't think it has the draw of 'free shipping' (+ music/TV/etc).
Interesting comment; as a non-native speaker "prime" evokes the idea of f'(x) and prime numbers. Prime is pretty silly (e.g., "Optimus Prime") and might be an inside joke.
What are these positive connotations? To me prime sounds neutral, like a fact.
Prime has a well established meaning and predates Amazon by, well, probably centuries. It is also well aligned with their original usage, in that preferred customers could pay more to get better treatment (faster deliveries and customer service response).
I think you're right on there. When I saw the title, my initial thought was that Google had developed some kind of rocket! In other words, the name gives so little information about what the product actually is that it could be literally anything.
i thought it is something to replace Google Plus :)
Speaking about bad namings - reminds me how back at Sun at one moment everything became "Java" (even stock ticker, no kidding). "We've got just 5 product boxes (Java this and Java that), just 5 boxes, that's all! Simplify things for the customer!" Lets just say that naming as Java various non-Java things simplified nothing for nobody.
Perhaps this is going the away of Amazon Prime - which started off as subscription for faster shipping but grew to be a one-stop subscription for various things?
A lot of Windows users probably know about OneDrive (https://onedrive.live.com/) since this is a similar service, I totally understand the naming choice here.
Ironically OneDrive used to be SkyDrive until Sky sued them. I guess everyone's switching to numbers because words are all trademarked, apart from the phoneme strings generated by the pharma industry.
When Porsche was releasing the 911 back in the 60s, Porsche wanted to name it “901”. Except Peugeot had a trademark on three-digit model numbers with a zero in the middle...
By talking to the French patent office, circa 1950s, apparently. I don't know what you're on about with the rest, but I'm just parroting what's well-documented, you're welcome to go look it up.
I figured you had to trademark specific numbers, not a regular expression "[0-9]+ 0 [0-9]+", which is how I'd guess it would work in the US, vs enumerating all the numbers in separate trademarks (patent #1 (100), patent #2 (101), ... (909)).
Also: "One" has so bad SEO that Google One does not show up on the first page of Google Search results and OneDrive only on the third page. Google One was not on the first five pages.
Its not a rip off, its just a very generic name. Tons of products do this, I assume because its relatively safe play when you can't (or don't want) a more standout branding.
“One” is generic...but it’s not descriptive. In other words it’s not cloud, drive, OS, etc. So in the context of computer goods and services One could be trademarked (which of course MS has). It’s like saying Apple is generic, it is but as Apple relates to computers and software it receives trademark protections.
When MS uses “one” across its product spectrum (OneDrive, Xbox One, One OS, One Note, One Guide) then google uses One...it’s not the same as MS OneDrive and Google Drive (ie descriptive) it’s more on par with MS creating a social network and calling it MS+. I think most would agree that’s either a ripoff or at least fail on many levels.
But MS OneNote was released right around the same time.
But let’s be serious Google spent millions to brand/launch this, and it’s got to be embarrassing that either: a. None of the yesmen thought to speak up and say hey should we really use a name MS uses for a bunch of their products (One Note, Xbox One, One OS, One Guide); or b. Straight ripped it.
Had they called it “iDrive”, or summat, the rip-off would have been obvious even though Apple has no such named product. Little accessory makers can get away with such naming because a) “Cheap-Ass iAccessories” isn’t a household name and b) their product probably has something to do with Apple stuff.
For a company like Google, I find it a bit embarrassing.
> Thank you for uploading 2 TB of data. Unfortunately Google One is being phased out and you will have until July 31st to download your data before it is pruned. Our new storage product is called Google Two - we don't currently have a migration program so you'll need to download and reupload your data once you pay for a Google Two membership. Thank you for being a loyal cus-tomb-er!
And a G+ instant archiving button will be their 'killer' feature in a couple of months. KA-CHING!!
Yes, it will even conveniently estimate the exact plan you'll need to purchase in order to store all of your posts, collections, and important communities.
whats Stripe mean? Whats Google mean? Whats Uber mean? Paul Graham has an essay about how the name of your company doesn't really mean anything, and you should always pick a name with the .com available.
It also seems to symbolize Google's real new mission statement, changed from "Organizing the world's information" to "Collecting all of your information*, whether they publicly admit to it or not.
Consolidation of the services is nice, but I feel like this is just getting creepier and creepier.
It’s like “put your entire digital existence onto our platform” Oh and by the way took “don’t be evil” out. Now give us all of your data, look at this beautiful UI!
Sorry Google, I don’t trust you anymore, I used to love you, it used to be about the ideals and ideas, but now avarice has possessed and consumed you.
Strange, I remember one person who spoke up at Google with what he believed was a legitimate problem and was subsequently tarred, feathered, and fired. Sets a good precedent for this culture they're promoting.
Factually correct, but missing the point entirely. Classic Robot.
It's ok Google, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.
You can go back to relentlessly optimizing the max($) function, but everyone is wising up to you.
I'm actually more worried about Amazon, Amazon are an aggressive weed with reaching tendrils, you are more like an aging billionaire, wealthy, unable to innovate, jaded, your spark has gone.
Your questionable activity means you no longer command the respect you once did. The greats are ambivalent about working for you, and the ones you hold - you only hold with money. When you have to pay all the time, it's not love (that's a joke, stand down the database queries)
Incidentally, don't you sometimes wonder why your founders are gone? Why Schmidt is gone? The greats have left, because of who you have become.
Would anyone trust them to not silently still collect personal data?
For example, even if they don't need the data now because you're paying not to see ads, they might still collect it so that they can show you "better" ads if/when you stop paying.
I don't really get why people assume they're chaotic evil rather than lawful evil. This is a large company with lots of lawyers. Modulo bugs, they're going to make sure anything they do is covered by the privacy policy rather than leave an opening to be sued.
So the answer is that I would trust that it (mostly) doesn't happen if the legal terms say it won't.
And as long as it has a warrant for one individual + multiple hops from that person you potentially legally sweep up hundreds/thousands of other innocent people's information - often full bore, not just metadata.
Isn't there a consistent history of shady practices from such companies, like purposely ambiguous language in the Android location activity preferences, or similar stuff from Facebook when they try to make you share more data with them like contacts?
There would be no economic advantage to that kind of behavior. I'm a fan of paid services rather than ad-based services because it switches the focus. The customer is the person that pays, not the advertising company, so the company will have an economic advantage to give a better service to you, not to the ad companies. Something like that would just jeopardise the customer for no particular economic gain, so yeah, I'd trust them.
I agree there wouldn't have been (much of) an advantage to that sort of behavior if Google had started with paid services from the beginning and never depended on advertising.
However, now that we're where we are, it's just so easy to keep tracking you, since they'd actually have to go out of their way to remove it from their tech stack, that doing it on the off chance that either A: someday you'll stop being a paid customer or B: someday a PM will need to show more revenue and they decide to stick ads on their paid service anyhow, the combined probability of which approaches 100%, is worth doing it. Path dependencies can cause strange things to happen.
I can't trust a company who has tracking everything and everybody woven into their tech stack at every level to stop.
Disabling ad tracking is not going to change how they scan all the file contents and categorize them using AI. It might be even more effective for them than tracking you on web.
They tried to do e2e encryption with Allo, then they integrated all the crappy smileys from it to their other messagong products, and got rid of Allo.
The scary thing is that in theory they don't have ads on messaging, but if it would be true, they would have gone farther with e2e
I basically agree with you, but my behavior is not consistent in regards to Google and privacy: I use Fastmail, DuckDuckGo, use Firefox containers for Google (and FB and Twitter), use Siri, etc. But, I have put all my pictures on Google Photos (used to be Picasa) since they rolled out the service and I buy a bulk of entertainment from Google Play movies/books and use GCP. So I do let them track me in some ways.
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to see a privacy concern comment. Totally agree with you by the way.
It feels like there is an ever growing privacy awareness yet companies like google keep pushing the cloud storage for typical consumer. I’d be curious to know how average person feels about storing their private photos in google’s servers.
To be fair, this stuff is probably not for the privacy conscious (and neither is FB). I doubt they mind you not signing up, you are not their target. Lots of other people are happy to give them all of their data, and that's ok.
Their support site is far more valuable than the landing page.
From the main support index at https://support.google.com/googleone/ here are various tidbits of useful content that the surrounding HN comments wished for (sorry, none describe the "expert help" available):
Yeah, the hotel benefits creep me out. At first glance, it’s an iCloud-like storage plan, fine. But reading more and finding the hotel benefits makes me think “oh right, Google wants to track everything I do online and offline and sell my info to advertisers.”
Yep it creates a direct connection between a cloud service and what you type in Google search box. That... seems strange. It make it sound like a repository for all of your data/activity on all Google services not just, you know, the data you upload to their cloud service.
Maybe they try to move toward aAmazon Prime-Style "one subsription to feed all your live-areas"-Service. Next time they might add pLay store-flatrates for books, video, music, apps and then combine it with youtube premium.
My guess would be a slow introduction of concierge type services linked into their phone AI thing that they launched 6 months ago to great fanfair, and a general move from software service companies (and my bank.) into offering concierge type services in general.
Banks have been doing concierge for ages, if you're at a "expensive enough" level (and it's not as expensive as one first might assume, my bank offers a full concierge service for 10 000€ / year that's basically "it's 2 am and you want something specific and you're wherever, call this number and we'll find it for you").
I don't think tech companies can compete with that; if you want a concierge on retainer you want a guy you can talk to and explain your weird request. Nobody is paying 10+k a month to get a "barely close enough" answer. I also don't believe that's what they aim.
Instead they intend to go for the "fake concierge, but close enough": tie-ins into all their sub products, in an unified subscription and interface, at a small fraction of the cost. Oh you want an hotel ? We have that. Renting a car ? Buying a musical instrument ? Make a reservation at a restaurant ? Done. Oh, you want that actually unique request that does not get enough volume by month to be a business on its own ? No, we don't do that, but here is the google search results for it.
In other words, I believe Google One aims to play in the same court as Amazon Prime.
Founder’s Club is a good example of the mid-tier concierge services, as it exists exclusively to provide concierge-like discounts for a specific demographic target at a significant enough to overcome the “not enough volume” concern that banks face.
These discount services have one critical weakness for most of us: you must spend at least 10x the membership fee each year on compatible services to benefit from the discounts. If you don’t spend at least $2000/year on eligble costs, paying $200/year for discounts rarely makes any sense once you add up the money saved.
Credit cards try to democratize through “points” but the same math applies when comparing to a debit card.
Hey Google ... I know you're here, looking for how this is going to go over.
It seems like a nice idea. I'm not on board with any new Google platform unless I have some sort of assurance that you're just not going to kill this off in two years, or let it suffer a slow death of neglect and attrition.
My employer uses gsuite and managing google cookies in a multi-login scenario is sufficiently annoying that I simply avoid using google services altogether.
Try using a browser that can better isolate your work account from your personal account. I recommend the latest firefox with site containers, but you could also use Chrome/Chromium and add a seperate profile for work (top right user icon > Manage people > Add person). This way, you will have separate windows for work/personal stuff with isolated histories and bookmarks.
I would go in that direction if I needed to but so far I simply haven't needed any google services that require a login.
I've read some horror stories about google pulling the plug on all accounts due to a billing conflict somewhere else in their ecosystem. That, together with the absolute PITA of managing multiple accounts pretty much ensures I will avoid ever paying to put my data in their hands.
This isn't some side project like Wave that they'll cut off. It sounds like a pretty core business. If anything it will get renamed and take on a different form in a couple yrs, but I doubt they'd ever stop offering a cloud service like Drive.
But still, this is a very valid point. It's hard to trust any Google service and it's risky to make any significant investment of time structuring your life around them. This is why I don't use Google Music anymore. I invest far too much time into my playlists and music collections to trust them.
Does the pricing make sense to anyone? 2TB is is $10/mo but 20TB is $200/mo. That means on a per-TB basis, the bigger plan is 2x as expensive. And then the 30TB is 2x as expensive as 20TB.
Not necessarily. Many people pay for 2 TB without actually needing 2 TB. I currently pay for Dropbox Pro, which has 2 TB of space available, but I'm only using 300 GB. I'm pretty sure that at this point people going over 500 GB are a tiny minority.
When you pay for 30 TB on the other hand, you probably need it, so their actual cost might be reflected well in that price. This is basically the long tail effect, so when you optimize the price for the majority, price increases are not linear.
Which basically every book on pricing recommends doing - pricing on value. People always apply Walmart style retail pricing models onto everything - including most entrepreneurs to their own detriment. Which is a terrible idea for software and most other non-retail/non-low-margin businesses.
Services usually offer convenience. If you don't care about it then you can already register on tons of sites with multiple accounts and get vast amounts of free storage.
This and they have been working on making many accounts hard for some time now.
> This and they have been working on making many accounts hard for some time now
I disagree with that.
The only "hard" part is stuff that absolutely makes sense during the creation part if you're making several: captcha, not allowing the same phone number to be the recovery for more than ~10 accounts, etc ... It's all very obvious protection against spam/mass registration, and if you are an actual person it takes only a few minutes to get around.
And if you go for paid accounts, all of those limits cease existing.
But beside that, once you have the accounts, it's all very friendly, the multi login where you don't even have to logout / log in other account / logout again / relog in first account, account delegation so you can have a master account with automatic access to others, library (apps, photos, ...) sharing, and all of that is on the free accounts !
It might be far from perfect, but compared to the other big ones Google is very friendly to multi-accounts users.
You can just register a GSuite Business account, with unlimited storage.
They have a fine print that says you need at least 5 users in your account or something, otherwise they limit you to 1 TB.
However they are not enforcing that limit and on /r/DataHoarder/ you can see people with dozens of TB stored without issues. And even if they start enforcing it, if you pay for multiple accounts it would still be pretty cheap and you don't get this multi-account management overhead.
> Lol, I would just buy multiple 2 TB subscriptions from different accounts.
If you don't mind multiple accounts and want to optimize on price, just get one 100GB subscription (for the expert help benefit), and lots of free accounts.
To be fair, someone who needs hundreds of TBs of storage is probably using it for something they're willing to spend quite a bit on (my first thought is self-employed photographers).
They put expensive pricing out so that the items covering 90% of their userbase look more appealing. Pricing 101. Look at any free to play game where you can buy in-game currency.
I've started to notice this sometimes. I kinda laugh it off but am actually terrified about how much thought I give to figuring out the optimal bargain offer for something I had zero need for.
Typically. I guess this one has something to do with the target market. 2TB/10$ is still a reasonable offer for individuals. 100$/month would already be rather an offer for companies, and those might not care if it's 200 instead.
alone the 2tb at $10/mo is what me annoys way more.
I need 1tb of space for my images but having to pay $10 makes me feel strange (yes it is relativly cheap and i can afford it) but this non linearity is probably here because of some mix calculation they are doing.
> Dropbox offers 1TB for $10 and 2TB for $20. Google added another zero (10x as much for the same price).
2 TB on Google One is $10, which is half of $20. I don't understands what you means by adding a zero. Are you comparing the 20TB offer which is $200 and have missed the 10x prices increase too?
The pricing is interesting when you compare it to G Suite pricing. For $10/user/month (with a minimum of 5 users) you get unlimited storage space. a pretty roundabout way of getting unlimited storage, but then you'd also save yourself $150/month or $1.8k/year
They're not enforcing the storage limit for <5 person accounts, either. My wife and I have GSuite+storage for $10/mo each and I've got about 4TB in my Drive right now.
They're trying to discourage large amounts of data in a single account, probably because the solution is currently engineered to scale in O(cN), where c > 1. Can't think of any other reason. If the engineering scales O(logN), you'd see linear pricing as a way to make a killing in bulk.
Because valuation of a software company doesn't come from the products they offer, nor the current user base with credit cards on file. It comes from a perceived potential growth/platform/network effect so all of these companies have to pretend that they will someday be a panopticon that commands your entire life in order to keep that sweet VC money flowing in even if they just repackage s3 with a nice client.
Woah. I clicked the link and was logged in already. I'm sure I logged in on this computer (work) at some point, but I'm disappointed that session didn't expire. I can't remember the last time I logged into dropbox here, it feels like months!
I had to switch back to Spotify a while ago to give my wife access to the premium I was already paying for via the family plan because Google Play Music doesn't support family plans for gsuite accounts.
If they addressed this issue I would probably consider consolidating Dropbox, Spotify, and maybe some other stuff into a single Google One subscription but I suppose grandfathered free gsuite accounts are a low priority for these things.
Organizational accounts have a different storage plan they can use that's more suited to their needs. This is only for personal accounts. And no, you don't have a personal account, which hopefully you knew 5 years ago when that happened.
In the process I found many small bugs, but also a huge one... if you have 200GB of photos in G Suite, share & copy to a Gmail account (G One) and then break the share... you have the 200GB of photos but Google One storage will report usage as 0GB.
Google One = Google Drive + more space + Customer Service for around $2 a month.
Customer Service is not called Customer Service but Google Experts. What does this mean for actual service?
The thing I like/jumps out for me is no compressing of images. That is one of the reasons I decided to go with Backblaze for backup. I would still stay with backblaze as I am not so confident about Google keeping the product around.
"Your stuff, anywhere". I have managed to setup a upload workflow for Backblaze on my linux machine without going through a browser. Not sure if it is possible in Google One drive. Browsers crash/freeze at the most importune moments. Then I need to restart the upload and pray. There is no way to say upload only the diff (atleast as far as I remember). The extra upload just means increased cost.
Still somewhere, someone in Google has finally listened(?) to the community and heard that customer support is needed. This is an excellent step in the right direction, I suppose.
The no compression thing caught my eye as well, but then I started thinking-- if I actually started using it to archive ALL of my 42MP photos I would start running into the higher cost brackets, and I don't want to pay that much. I still need an archiving solution, but since my photography is only a hobby for me, I would only see using it to archive my favorite shots while I keep everything else on external hard drives.
There is no special privacy policy, in other words, if you upload your "whole life" to there, as they suggest, then your whole life is owned by Google and they can do whatever they want with that data, as you signed over all the rights.
I mean, I use online storage for my family pictures, my important documents etc. etc, and so the minimum requirement is that it is encrypted and the company contractually agrees not to snoop, data-mine or even sell that data.
Google basically tells you they will do all of that, tied to the most invasive unique ID except than maybe facebook.
Why would anyone actually do that? That's just a disaster waiting to happen...
Well, poor customer-service is a longstanding complain about google. Maybe with GOne you now get some real human who takes care of your complain, before they ban your account for violation of what their AI Overlord told them.
In the near future, 2 people are on GChat, I mean Hangouts, I mean Duo, I mean Allo, I mean FB Messenger. And one of them is one of those people that can't use the shift key:
One is just the "in" thing like what "Cloud" was once. One has somehow equated to Storage in the Cloud that is accessible everywhere. OneDrive, OneNote, Ubuntu One etc.
$1.99/mo expert access seems like it could be a valuable selling point to sway older people over to Google One that have never used cloud storage much before. There's still people out there that don't know how to use Dropbox or Google Drive.
So looking from a single private user's perspective: Google One has best pricing, but no Linux native client and Dropbox has Linux native client and no flexible pricing.
I don't understand why they won't develop a client for Linux. Is it that difficult? Maybe the code could be also useful for Chrome OS and I guess many Googlers use Linux, so it would be useful for them too.
I stick with Dropbox for the Linux support. It is fantastic. It works on servers, with no GUI, so I can easily sync stuff from my Windows Laptop and my Linux server, where I perform scientific stuff.
We're also the only set of users that will actually saturate the oversold storage while still burning through that $2.50 worth of customer service with a single question prefaced with "hi, I run Linux."
Hell even the Windows client is shit compared to Dropbox. I think it is because they want everyone to keep everything in the cloud - not to use it as synced backup for stuff that really lives on your desktop (which is of course what everyone actually wants).
Have you tried Nextcloud? Its slick right up until you get a few users that actually use all the core apps (contact syncing, automatic uploads, calendars, etc), then rendering the PHP login page jumps to taking 20 seconds of maxing out all CPU cores on the server.
Their IRC channel is no help in debugging. Disabling all apps doesn't help, looking at the php & syslog don't show any errors, and adding caching only saves a few seconds of rendering time.
Nextcloud has seriously lowered my standards for bad PHP projects, making most others look well written and decently documented/debuggable.
Dropbox is ext4 only, which led me to drop Dropbox entirely. Not that I was a heavy user, but I've moved to self-hosted nextcloud which has been mostly fine.
You'd think an advertising company would be better at, well, advertising. All of the listed benefits at the top of the page are either things everyone has already been using with the exception of full-quality photos, which was previously available as a paid option with the same pricing, and unspecified additional promotional features.
It seems like the main improvements are adding family plans to match Apple and having presumably not-chatbot support but that requires scrolling a long way down the page.
For those wondering, this is Google Drive's paid plans, but it has undergone a rebranding to emphasize Google's ecosystem. I can think of some reasons why this might be a good idea:
1. Your storage in Google Drive is actually not used only by what's on GDrive, but includes your emails and Google Photos. So it is more correct to deemphasize the connection to GDrive.
2. This is a good first step to unify Google's paid B2C services that it may want to offer, especially since G+ is being discontinued.
Kind of related, I was recentl thinking about making some backups of valuable (emotionally speaking) things like wedding pictures.
Currently they are backed up on my local machine and my server, but was considering cloud options. My wife does use Google Drive (paid account w/ Chromebook) but I don't feel that comfortable with Google things.
Does anyone have good alternatives that perhaps respect privacy? :)
Services dedicated to this purpose like Backblaze and Crashplan allow/enable, maybe even enforce client-side encryption. In some cases, you have quite a lot of control over things like the keys and precise encryption settings.
I wouldn't dismiss Google. I personally use both Google Drive and GSuite. The ability to search inside the files of your whole library (documents/pdfs/videos) is very useful, while the integration of gmail + Drive + Docs bumps your productivity.
How does it achieve searching inside photos and videos? Have they been fed to the machine classifier so that if I enter "Poland" it will try to show me my holiday photos from there?
I tend to manually back up digital assets to Google/Dropbox/OneDrive by Zipping by category with good file naming protocol including date, GPG encrypt the Zip files, and not depend on the trustworthyness of cloud providers. ‘Deep backups’
Also, high value digital artifacts like my book projects and customer work get backed up automatically to remote git servers.
I seldom do local backups anymore on my MacBook to TimeMachine, perhaps once a month, and for backing up my Linux laptop I only back up to multiple cloud providers and git remote services.
You cannot assume that any remote storage provider will respect your privacy. So you will need to encrypt on your end.
With that in mind, borg backup does a great job at archiving/compressing/encrypting. Then you can sync to GDrive or any other service using e.g. rclone.
I pay $5/yr (a legacy plan that will disappear if I ever have a billing information imperfection) for 40GB Gmail storage, which is all I need. This announcement reminds me that Google has no respect for pricing, SLA, data mining transparency, consumer terms stability, support ("Google Expertsbutprobablynotouremployees!") or consistency. The future is easy to see: "Drive is now One!"
So this announcement is the thing that will finally get me to export all of my data and leave Gmail for personal use altogether. Congratulations, One Team!
You have a nice rent controlled storage offering and you're leaving because Google is adding a new service? Or are they evicting you from your old plan?
Really don't follow how this announcement lacks respect for pricing or sla.
I have a fair amount of stuff on Google drive and I would have liked to consolidate there, but the lack of a Linux client was a deal breaker, so I'm stuck with Dropbox.
Not that Dropbox is bad. It would be nice to have things in one place only, but maybe it's better to not be completely dependent on one service.
Dropbox now only (officially) supports un-encrypted bare ext4 filesystems. If you plan on using XFS, BTRFS, or even encrypted ext4, you're SOL with Dropbox. https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-linux-ext4-only/
NextCloud and a $5/mo VPS work great for me.
Funnily, on my encrypted disk in Debian, Dropbox needs constant monitoring to make sure it's working (need to execute a couple of simple python scripts now and then), while Drive works perfectly through InSync.
In what seems to be a standard move for Google these days, the page contains no information about the product for me as it's not available in my area yet. Would someone care to post that information?
Google One sounds like a device to me. I think it would be clearer to take the existing "Google Family" service they already offer (of which Google One is feature) and add "Shared expanded storage on Drive, Gmail, and more" as an optional feature.
Is Google just a prepetual exercise in branding? They create a slightly different product, get it to popularity, kill it, announce a new brand to replace it, rinse, repeat.
Language wise this sounds like the Trojan horse that eventually becomes their amazon prime as far as being a “one stop” membership. It’s disguised as storage right now but seeing the bit about hotel deals... also prime ~ one... hmm.
Why this wouldn’t also bundle things like YouTube red or google music proves my hypothesis wrong though.
I just don’t know what the hell is going on at Google lately. What is their strategy? What is their vision? Everything they do is so disjointed and incongruent.
Why would it, though? It's not a new product, it's just Google Drive under new branding and Drive has been around for about 5 years already. It's also a paid service where they now even offer better customer support.
I don't get the "they'll shut this down anyways" sentiment in every Google related submission on HN. It's getting tiresome.
How significant would the revenue from these services? I mean, if it's quite significant, doesn't it make sense to offer an "ad-free" plan where they do not track the user and do not show them ads. Only a small portion of their tracking user base would be affected and they would not lose many of the privacy aware users as customers.
> doesn't it make sense to offer an "ad-free" plan where they do not track the user and do not show them ads.
They did try it with Google Contributor, but only for a short amount of time to a limited set of users (US only). Now it changed to be for specific websites only which is pretty absurd.
I believe they haven't move toward ad-free plans simply because it would cannibalize their own product. They can sell ad space because they get ad view from all type of consumer. If they can't reach theses consumers, they have nothing to sell, thus will lose theses sales.
I think it's absurd though because it's the future and instead each website will implements it (and some will implements it together) which will cannibalize Google. Patreon is just the beginning.
I think customer willing to pay to not to be tracked is not a customer for them anyway. For example, I myself have adblockers installed, use Firefox with tracking protection, use Duckduckgo as search and Outlook as email (this can be debated). It's true that not everyone can go that far in protecting themselves from tracking, but adblockers are quite common.
Web ad-platforms are different from traditional ad-platforms, like television, because in latter you don't really have an option to skip/ignore ads.
It's just a rebranding of Google Drive. It's crazy the amount of people here that believe it's a brand new product. Isn't there more user of Google Drive? My account was simply "migrated" to Google One.
I thought exactly the same today when I had to switch from inbox to gmail. Now if I want to know about my trips I have to use the Google Trips app, which I can only use on mobile.
It's also a perfect example of how product management works at Google. It overlaps heavily with Google Drive and Google Photos and it probably only makes sense to the people who worked on it. Don't worry though, it will get cancelled just as soon as anyone can figure out what the heck it's for.
Isn't it obvious? "Google Drive is a storage service. Google One is a subscription plan that gives you more storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos"(from faq) One is storage and the other is storage.
So does this mean that if I pay for this as an Android dev and I have Play store issues, I can talk to an actual human instead of to a bot that just sends the same auto-reply ? And does it mean getting actual answers instead of them evading the question ?
If you aren't in one of the small number of supported regions, you can't see this information. In Hong Kong, we just see a page that says "Google One is coming soon. Expanded storage, access to Google experts and more – in one shareable plan.
Be among the first to know when Google One is available in your area."
Google One is finally available in my country, although I was hoping for YouTube Premium, which isn't available yet.
Things to note:
1. Google's Drive File Stream is still not available for normal accounts, only for GSuite — I wonder why, because Backup and Sync is pretty shitty, at least on Macs
2. GSuite Business costs per user about the same price as Google One's 2 TB plan and you get essentially unlimited storage, Gmail on your own domain, a better ToS
In other words, GSuite is a much better deal, the only annoyance for people that are into Google Photos is that photos in your Drive won't appear automatically in G Photos (not covered by GSuite, different ToS) ... but that's probably a good thing :-)
So I'm wondering, for power users that would want this, why bother with Google One at all?
Wait for Google one Allo with desktop client, which will be neither compatible with old Google one and also only support large files, but it automatically recognise your neighborhood and suggest you to buy from nearby store.
I couldn't find anything about availability (24/7?), response times, or issue escalation for their 'experts.' If I got locked out of my account, would I still have access to an expert to help?
Agreed. It didn't even make much sense a few years ago with products like the Xbox One or the HTC One. Heaven help us if Apple refreshes their Mac Pro as the Mac One.
My only guess is that large companies suffer from too much bureaucracy when it comes to naming. As a result, you'll never get a phenomenal name, but you also won't get a really bad name either. Odds are you'll get something within a couple standard deviations of "normal" and end up with a name that's just kind of... boring.
My experience with Google's Backup and Sync means I would never trust Google again.
I put everything on Google's Backup and Sync... and was initially happy enough with it as a replacement for Dropbox.
Then my laptop crashed.
When I went to restore, I was limited to copying files down 2 GB at a time.
Worse... the process didn't tell me that, I had to figure it out after doing a few downloads and finding that not all my files made it. There was no warning, no errors. I hit download on a folder, it came down "successfully" but when I looked at the contents locally vs. what was on Google Drive it never matched up.
Can't stress enough how shitty this was. I had to manually save everything and manually check to make sure it all saved. I'm still not convinced I got it all downloaded correctly. Took probably 100 hours of my time. Never a single error message if you tried to download a folder that was bigger than 2 GB, but behind the scenes it was truncating files.
Is the sign up box for a mailing list so you'll be informed when it becomes available in your country?
For me (Germany, mobile Firefox) it's completely overladen with animations that showcase all the wonderful file formats you can store on your cloud drive.
No, it does say anything directly along the lines of "get updated when available in your region", but if you read between the lines, it could definitely be understood that way, now that you mention it.
Interesting that it is available in only some EU member countries, but not all of them. Oddly, not Ireland.
List of countries where Google One is available
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Canada
France
Germany
India
Israel
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Russia
South Korea
Spain
Taiwan
United Kingdom
United States
This is actually a valid use case and some of my friends desire exactly that from them - i.e., all Google's smarts, without the tracking part (for individuals). I think they'll find a lot of customers willing to pay a good amount for that.
I hoped it would be that coveted product, but there is not enough clarity on that at least to me. Do they say somewhere that they do not track you at all if you take their GSuite?
"Space for everything! Your life, uncompressed! Top standard tier, 200GB!"
OK, I'm a photographer. But I literally outgrew a 300GB drive about 10 years ago, and genuinely shot nearly 100GB in one week on a trip earlier in the year. Heck, my music collection's over 100GB. (No, I don't stream. Too much obscure stuff, too many low bit rate feeds.)
Those numbers. Bit basic. I remember the days when Google's storage offerings were light years ahead of the competition and effectively infinite for most uses.
I'm willing to bet most users don't use 100GB per week of cloud storage. It seems like your expectation of "effectively infinite for most uses" is still true, you just don't fit the definition of "most uses".
I will admit 100GB a week is an unusual case, I've certainly not replicated it myself. But there'll be a lot of people with half-decent cameras for which 200GB is nowhere near 'everything'.
I thought that first. With the exception that they exactly leave the Onedrive storage class (1TB, 60$/year) out. If you are happy with 200GB, the Google offer seems to be a lot cheaper. If you need up to 1TB, you pay twice than for Onedrive. Theoretically you can even count Office 365 Home as a 5TB, 90$ option, which makes it even yet cheaper. However that's a bit more of an unfair comparison, since it would involve the hassle of using multiple accounts (and I'm not even sure if the Onedrive app would allow that on a single installation).
I think that microsoft did really good job with their Office 365 home package.
Each of the 6 accounts gets:
- 1TB for OneDrive
- Office licence
- 60mins for Skype
- 50GB for Outlook
Initially I wanted to go with the Google Drive because I'm using Android, but after trying android and mac one drive clients i decided to go with one drive.
I have paying for Google Drive/One for a year now and having tried Dropbox and Amazon Cloud, GDrive is the easiest for my family. It is seamless for us to back up all camera and phone pictures from both Android and iOS and is much faster and less buggy than Amazon.
I do agree with people's reservations about privacy and longevity with Google, their products don't seem to last for long!
Google One hasn't been around for close to a year yet so I assume you were using Google Drive specifically before Google One was officially released? My experience was the opposite of this and because of this experience, I refuse to pay for any Google services moving forward.
Just a reminder. You are the product Google sells. This is a premium service to make you a more premium product that Google will sell to advertisers. We should all be looking at different (non advertising) models for the services they are offering. Hyper-targeted advertising and all the risks associated with it is not good for society.
I fly in to a rage now every time I hear this. It's become completely and utterly meaningless. "If you're not paying, you're the product!" -> "If you're paying, you're just a better product for them to sell!"
It might be true, but there exists not a single person on this site who hasn't heard it, and it provides absolutely zero value.
It was never even true to start with. The act of paying for something in no way has ever made you ineligible as a source of other revenue.
I really wish Google would have clearly said whether they will or will not monetize data inside Google One accounts. With my paid G Suite account for personal use I have some confidence Google isn't monetizing my Gmail, Drive, and hopefully Photos, but with Google One, I can't see the same policy written clearly.
My personal approach to storage is to prescind as much from it as I can. I'm constantly deleting old photos and media that I create, as I believe that I will have less and less time to even see them again in the future, so I'm trying to live as light as possible and keep only the 'prime' material.
Name is terrible. So, Google One is only about storage. Google Music is different subscription. I would laugh if google would make some Play Store subscription and call it Google Everything. Then you'll have to get Google One and Everything.
And yet again they don't care about gsuite users. I have a gsuite setup for everyone in the family, for pretty much exactly the same needs that are addressed by Google One, but apparently there's absolutely no way to get the benefits of both.
Will the current or future google censor be applied to your access of your data?
If you have any copyrighted material in your data/content without a valid proof of ownership or payment -> censored OR worse prosecuted and racketted to pay?
It may be a good deal for the space but do not buy this for better support because it is absolutely nonexistent. It takes about 48 hours to get the first email reply and is the same team and capability as the free consumer services.
Some of the scariest words that occur when a radical new product is launched are telling current customers of existing products "you'll be automatically upgraded".
No, it's just a poorly constructed website that doesn't have any machine-readable summary, and doesn't even conform to their own guidelines about machine-readable summaries. At least the marketing page for this product gives you a realistic impression of how the customer experience will be...
I'm not sure about that. Even basic sites with only the 'title' tag set, still create a popup in WhatsApp, albeit with just the title text (obviously).
I still don't understand. What is Google One? Photos and Drive storage still seems separate from each other. So, why is it called One? Have they just changed the paid plans?
Everyone putting everything they own into one place will help Google acquire more data about its users. It's fox asking all the hens to put their eggs in one basket.
It's optional now. But, give it a few years, and no one will be allowed to use Google services without all their stuff on One.
Everyone is so busy asking "what even is this?" that they're forgetting to ask the more typical question about a new Google product - "will this still be around next year?"
Your logic is sound, but is Google's? We all thought that a product based on top of their already-necessary spidering of substantial portions of the web -- Reader -- was also unlikely to go away, and look what happened.
I think that Google have passed Peak Innovation, and now all they can see is stuff other companies are doing and thrashing about going, "We ought to be doing that, too." Check in with MS to ask how well that works.
It seems like Google always gets in it's own way and this is no exception. They need to stop with this nonsense and bring back apps that are actually useful like Google Reader and improving apps that folks use everyday like Gmail and Google Maps. When is the last time one of these apps had a memorable and compelling new feature?
A lot of people here have commented about their mistrust in Google and won't use this service. I thought I'd add my two cents base on actual experience with using Google One.
I signed up the day Google One became available since I had been looking for a cloud storage solution. I downloaded their uploader client and began backing up my files. I am sure the fact that it took over two weeks was a mix of my own ISP upload speed and maybe some limitation on how much the client could handle in terms of uploading files (I had just over half a TB to back up).
That said, the speed wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me was the stupid client kept throwing me errors constantly telling me it couldn't upload certain files (always random) and although it gave me an option to retry, I could click retry a dozen times and it wouldn't matter, it'd simply fail over and over again. My only option at this point was to skip uploading this file. If this had been a few files, that wouldn't be an issue except this was easily hundreds of files with no easy way to keep track of what successfully uploaded and what didn't.
Worse, each time it failed, it interrupted whatever I was doing to pop up a notification with the expectation of me having to select retry or skip. This was insanely annoying. I could be doing something and a notification would pop up and unless I respond, it would just sit there. Sometimes I'd be doing something and the notification would interrupt what I am doing midflow. Needless to say this was an abysmal experience.
I then tried contacting support wanting a refund and to simply cancel. First I tried chat which connected relatively fast but it was obvious the person I talked to didn't know what they were talking about. I then did phone support. To their credit they called me back within an hour though it hung up on me shortly after picking up so I then had to get them to call again and there goes another hour.
Eventually, I did get to talk to a human being but felt I was talking to someone who had very little knowledge about how anything worked. I had to get the case escalated to get the service cancelled since the department that handled that had no direct support.
After waiting about a week, I contacted support again and went through the whole motion all the while finding out it seems like the case wasn't properly escalated. Waited several more days and had to contact support again. It had to be escalated again.
During this whole ordeal, I had already stopped the client, uninstalled it, and removed any files I had uploaded.
After about another week, one day suddenly I accessed my Gmail to find a glaring message at the top that read something to the effect of me being over my storage limit and will soon be unable to receive any emails. I was pissed.
At this point they didn't contact me at all, I haven't seen any refund come through, but my access to Google One was gone so I assumed I was cancelled. But if I deleted all the files I previously uploaded, how could I be over the limit?
The only conclusion I could come up with was any photos I took on my Pixel (which came with unlimited photo storage) somehow was being read as non-Pixel photos so my photo storage blew up. I had to forcibly set it to convert all the images to the format that Google would allow that wouldn't be used against my storage space and eventually after like 2-3 hours my Gmail no longer had that glaring message that I may not receive messages due to being over my storage limit.
Now I'm painfully aware I probably could have backed up all my photos and delete them off Google Photos at this point but I was so exhausted and angry that I just took the path of least resistance here. Eventually the refund came through several days later but this was when I genuinely started to hate Google for the first time.
Hope this helps anyone on the fence about paying for Google One, especially with the expectation that you'll get support as if that'll be helpful.
I ended up going with a different cloud storage. World of difference. Never going to trust Google for anything like this ever again.
It’s nice that you can store photos and it’s nice that you can maybe actually finally get support from them, but I don’t understand why those two things are bundled together. Their product offerings are typically sort of baffling
It's probably a great internal name - hey, we've been providing storage for photos, email, docs, drive, and more, for over a decade, and we've finally integrated that storage into one space, so let's call it Google one! It's a great name - simple and powerful, symbolizes the effort and direction we've taken in the past 5-10 years of integrating our consumer, day to day products.
However, outside of the Google box, no one understands or cares what they've been doing. "Google one" sounds like... nothing. "What is it???" is an extremely appropriate response.
Maybe in the future it will come to symbolize all the services of Google, available in one centralized location, allowing for future consumers to easily access all of google services without separate pay schemes, storage, or other infrastructure, and make it a 1 stop shop for your services needs, common or obscure.
But right now, the copy and landing page are way off the messaging mark.