As a counterpoint to that, Dropbox might not exist in 5 years. Google most likely will.
Basically, there is no answer here that guarantees the future of your cloud storage. It's useful to access your files from multiple locations, but using it for long term file archival seems like asking for disappointment (as well as being a neat way of throwing money into the sky).
That's not too unlikely, if by "Drive" you mean the desktop sync application, which pretty clearly has always been pretty tangential to the strategic purpose of Drive, which is first and foremost a cloud storage platform for web apps (Google first-party apps, institutional customer second-party apps, and ISV third-party apps).
So I trust that Dropbox _will_ be out of business very soon.
while I agree with you in principle, there's also quite a lot more people who simply are happy (relieved, even) that they can make the computer help them perform the task they want to accomplish. I'm not even saying that Dropbox or Google is better at this, just that I see people use every day just what's right in front of them and they know they can make work. and because of that they don't seem to have the luxury (even if they have the foresight) of considering what will stick around for longest (or perhaps what's idealistically "right" to choose).
again, I'm not defending this situation. but it does seem (to me) that the majority of people are motivated by this, and cannot afford or consider decisions like whether or not to "simply not trust Google".
Google's advantage is that they can slowly eat away at Dropbox's market share by integrating Google Drive with and marketing it through their other products.
Dropbox's advantage is their existing customer base.
In time I think Google's got the upper hand on this one.
I don't see how that's a hard and fast rule. File storage is Dropbox's only business line - if it fails, they're gone. If it helps their other concerns (Gmail, Google Apps) Google can prop up Drive even if its unprofitable.
Depends.
Google might decide to stop supporting it because they want to focus on something else and DropBox might decide to pivot because they can no longer make enough money compared to the costs they incur (especially as Google is slowly squeezing them out of the market with the kind of price slashing we are currently discussing).
Nobody can claim with certainty which of Google or DropBox is more likely to support their product the longest.
This announcement just made that significantly cheaper, and there's opportunity here for a "cloud RAID" offering to take the hassle out of mirroring one's data. Dropbox already has the API, so they could turn this to their advantage.
I take a picture with my phone? It's on dropbox. My wife takes a picture? It's on dropbox. I take a screenshot on my PC? It's on dropbox.
I even wrote a little silly bookmark tool to use the dropbox API.
Dropbox is amazing. It's more than just about the price.
You just answered your own question. Dropbox is convenient because you've already installed it everywhere. Google Drive is already on your Android phone and in your e-mail inbox.
I can't put my finger on it but Drive just seems clunky, especially with the GMail / Docs integration.
I'd just stop you there because you may have answered your own question.
If I was new to the market, though, none of that reasoning really applies.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dripmarks/oeibaijn...
There is a legitimate reason to be wary of relying on anything Google.
Just to be absolutely clear... you'll have 2 years to drag and drop a folder to another location.
Are you saying they may significantly cut down the cloud capabilities?
Google Wallet does not have subscriptions.
None of my customers missed Google Checkout. I got burned by losing subscriptions due to Google Checkout retirement.
I'm not going to touch Google Wallet.
Dropbox, on the contrary, only has a SINGLE service to rely on, and they could be made obsolete by pricing, features, integration or other stuff like that. It's not good to rely on a single service for your bottom line, and Dropbox is no longer a small startup just beginning on the market.
Google Drive is such a major part of Google strategy, that it seems remarkably unlikely to suffer the same fate.
And if it does? Google's deprecation and data export policies have on the whole been handled fairly well.
I just see a bunch of people still sulking about Reader and bringing it up at every opportunity. I too was sad to see it go. But Wave? It never got traction and even that was open-sourced instead of just being shuttered. The other examples you give aren't terribly persuasive examples either.
I can think of many smaller companies who've dealt with this much more poorly. I'm fairly complacent about Google on this issue.
it doesn't have threaded commenting which is sad, but the mobile apps are much better.
On the other hand your worry, while justified, does not apply to Google Drive. Google Drive is now an integral part of:
- GMail
- Google Apps
- Android
- Chromebook
- Google+
With Google Cloud the only thing I don't trust long term is their pricing - they have a history of releasing cheap or free stuff, earn popularity, earn users, after which they realize that their costs are greater than their earnings and raise those prices. Examples: Google App Engine and Google Apps.
In regards to DropBox, I support them but they really do need to reduce the pricing for those paid accounts. Pretty soon I'll need more than 100 GB and paying $19.99 per month for 200 GB is a little too expensive already, given that after a while I'll need more than 200 GB and then for 500 GB I'll need to pay $50 / month and that's way too much, when Google's 1 TB offer is for $10 / month and would last me for 2-3 years at least.
Apparently around half of the 20,000 Google employees use a version of Ubuntu ('Goobuntu'), so I wouldn't say they don't care about Ubuntu...
Meanwhile, Picasa integration was strong enough that it took years for me to figure out how to get rid of the screenshots I used on my blog 6 years ago out of the Photos app on my phone. But I wouldn't bet on Picasa being around for the long term.
Basically, I can easily see Google pivoting away from Drive being a sync client and towards some kind of always-online thing with a light local cache.
This is exactly the case for staying with Dropbox. Otherwise, your cloud provider has more leverage to lock you into their products. Dropbox is motivated to support multiple platforms.
I mean, skipping over Linux users that are a significant chunk of the market if you ask me, but lets assume for a moment that Linux home users don't pay much for their software or whatever. What about governments that have adopted Linux? What about Linux being the most popular OS for servers? What about Linux being used in the educational system, like with Raspberry Pi?
And even for yourself, lets say that you'd want to do your own backups of your Skydrive or Google Drive and so you quickly setup your own home Linux box that should synchronize your account. Surprise - you're not important enough.
This is platform lock-in, pure and simple. Microsoft is no better than Google. Don't get me started on Skype ;-)
Because for Google and Microsoft, their services are cloud storage components of their strategic platforms, and support for other platforms is, where it exists at all (e.g., Drive's desktop sync application), a way to ease migration off of those platforms and into the vendor's strategic platform, whereas for Dropbox, the file storage is the strategic product.
Of course, that's why neither Google nor Microsoft need their storage products to make profit directly for them to be valuable.
> This is platform lock-in, pure and simple.
With Drive, which has an API on which third party can build sync apps for other platforms, I don't think its lock in. Its just a matter of prioritizing a tool whose business purpose is customer acquisition for the platforms where the most potential customers are.
I know, I know, it comes integrated with Win8.1, but you can't use a local account, and your options to use SkyDrive with a local account are just nasty workarounds:
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/09/access-skydrive-windows-8-1...
Ex. When you use a domain account managed by someone else (ex. your employer or school)
1) Google Drive is a fundamental part of their online office suite, which means it's used internally for day-to-day employee work. Reader, Wave, Finance didn't get that status. Not to mention that having paid enterprise plans means it's a bit more mature than other things.
2) In 5 years, Dropbox could very well be referred to as "the discontinued Yahoo! Dropbox" or something similar. Not easy to predict that either.
Risk A) Google might end support for Drive. They've shown that , if they do, they'll give a lot of notice. You'll have an opportunity to move your files elsewhere.
Risk B) Dropbox goes out of business. Most likely because Google is undercutting their prices by about 90%. If you are lucky, they give some notice. They also might just send everyone home and shut off the lights, like many companies do when they file for bankruptcy.
Where's the risk really?
2. These files are all on our computers. I suspect that if dropbox blows up and does just go home and shut off the lights, we'll hear about it and notice. We can then take those files and move them to google drive or whatever.
And how do you know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years? They can't:
a) Go out of business, or b) Be acquired and have the service shutdown, or c) Have some new application of the core technology become more profitable, pivot to that as their prime focus, and discontinue the existing service retaining the infrastructure for that new application.
> Google Groups used to be huge, now to get to them you must click Apps -> More -> Even more from Google -> Scroll to the bottom of the page.
Or just type "Groups" in the Google search bar, and its the first result.
> What guarantee do we have here?
The same as you have with Dropbox.
> I'm sorry if I come off as scaremongering.
Then stop scaremongering.
And besides, if you're relying on a single system for all your backups, you're doing it wrong.
Dropbox doesn't have a 1TB plan, but 2x500GB costs $1000/year. On Drive, it costs $100/year. That's a difference of $900/year.
I don't know where you live, but around here $900/year buys you a pretty fucking good connection, with blackjack and hookers included.
it can also take a very long time.
So what? You can still use Drive until everything is copied.
Well, that's terrible and you are no doubt aware of that. I live in Philadelphia and pay $74.95 per month for Unlimited home phone service, Prime TV channel lineup and 75 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps upstream unlimited Internet through Verizon FIOS.
I currently use both Dropbox and OneDrive but this pricing is ridiculously cheap. I've been purposely holding back on the things I back up onto cloud because of its costs but if competitors don't follow suit I'll be switching. The main thing I haven't been backing up in the cloud are the ~ 400 GB of home movies I have.
300 down / 20 up with a 1 TB cap doesn't come cheap when no competition exists at those speeds. If it were even offered in my area, fibre from the same company is north of $3000/year, and for that all I get is symmetric uplink.
Still, at 300 down, 1 TB = 8388608 mbits / 300 mbits/s = 466 minutes or just under 8 hours. And luckily, my monthly cap is 1 TB. (Also lucky: I don't download 24/7 to hit that cap in under 8 hours.)
50Mbit down - 50Mbit up - no data caps (or so they say).
And yes, I do (provided the other end is capable) see those speeds.
Yeah. I noticed that too -- if a site is slow, I now either blame the location-unaware Google DNS (because of crappy ISP-provided DNS) or I know to blame the site. Even if I hardcode an alkamai address for my favourite streaming site, the only way I get to top speed is by 802.11ac when my Nexus 5 is cooperating (it really likes the stability of G or N) or by plugging in with gigabit Ethernet. But wow, it makes the Internet at work seem blazing slow. A reverse from the 90s, eh? ;-)
Funny. I would have thought more people on HN would chime in with plans $100+. Of course it also makes it harder for me to shop for a dedicated server -- since I really want gigE or 10gigE to serve things fast enough to myself. And the sad truth is I know I'll see 600-1.2gbits over copper before I see fiber optics. I give it another 2-3 years tops. (Why? I'm already hooked up locally to 600mbps, but they only use half right now.) I just hope prices don't double again, as 5 years ago this plan was nearly half off for half the speed.
That said, I'd pay the same to Google Fiber if they chose Toronto next year (yes, I know it's near double), just so I could have a proper, local DNS service from my ISP with no search hijacking. Is it too much to ask a telco for respect to go along with speed?
As residential users we are I think prone to forget how much cheaper and faster our unreliable async connections are in comparison to business broadband.
a t1 was "fast" about 15 years ago, so if you learned a tiny bit about business class internet right around when you were 20 like I did, that's how fast a connection would have been around then.
Even if you go for a business-class connection, it's $70/month for 16/3.
In short, you need to find a better ISP. :)
Severely.
Yeah, I guess I'd call that "choice".
And yes it can take a long time, but you might swap cloud providers every 2-5 years, you're not doing it every day. Even if it still takes a month to copy all your files, that's generally an unattended process, so it's not such a big deal.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's not a huge deal. All things considered, it's pretty easy to switch.
Not if you have Google Fiber!
Of course, you have to hope they don't exit that business, as well.
If google shutters it, it's not like copying a bunch of files from one place to another and waiting for it to auto-sync is a difficult endeavor.
(right now my money is on Yahoo! acquiring db to better compete with Google...but the price might be too high).
If something happens they decide to close it in the future I'll get my data pulled down and get into another service...but until then I'll be happy to keep my 150 bucks a year!
Besides, who knows where Dropbox or anyone else will be in 5 years. In 5 years they'll need to be turning a profit which could have a major impact on product and pricing, especially for the "backup" use case.
Incidentally if backup is what you want, check out an optimized service like Backblaze.. $5/month unlimited storage.
Here, you're paying. It's a business. You've got the same guarantee as you've got with Dropbox.
You refer to Dropbox and Google Drive as backup solutions. When I evaluated Dropbox, I read that they offer an addon named Packrat that turns their popular file synchronization service into an actual backup solution. Does Google now offer a similar addon for Google Drive? If not, Google Drive isn't a backup solution. And without Packrat, neither is Dropbox.
The barriers to switching away from Dropbox are based more on the number of products with Dropbox API integrations, and not on the switching costs for file sync.
Interestingly, after I read this sentence, I thought "Yeah, I'm not so sure DropBox will be around as long as Google, so I'll stick with Google".
And then I realized you wanted to make the opposite argument.
That's pretty wild. I didn't renew my Dropbox Pro account since it was by far my most expensive backup option.
I've got my Drobo that's been my Time Machine thingy for the past 5 years. I've got iCloud for recent-ish stuff. I've got Backblaze for long-term storage at $5/month (or whatever).
I had to pick and chose what to put on Dropbox and it was the most expensive option.
With Google Drive I can go back to that pricing, but no longer have to pick and choose and still get the (infrequently used, but convenient) drag & drop sharing between devices.
I think I'm going to sign up.
Google is about as likely to shut off Google Drive as it is to shut off it's search engine.
It has generally taken years of neglect for services of Google to be discontinued. Google reader was hardly updated for the last 2 years it existed.
This is a service you are paying for, how many payed for services have been discontinued by google?
Its central to the "Chrome everywhere" / Chrome web store / Chromebook strategy, and central to Google Apps for Business (both because "Drive" subsumed the office suite that used to be "Docs & Spreadsheets", and because its a platform for second/third-party apps for Apps users.)
But the Drive desktop sync application is pretty peripheral to any of those things that provide confidence that Drive itself will hang around for a long time -- so if people are thinking of Drive primarily as a desktop sync solution and worrying that Google might cancel that, well, that's probably not as unlikely as the idea that Google is likely to cancel Drive itself anytime in the forseeable future.
The simple fact that Google can get paid for a service that only helps them further their profiling and profitability in ads and Chrome OS is more reason for them to offer the service.
I don't question reliability. I question privacy, and until Dropbox makes their NSA agreement (which I remember reading they didn't)...Dropbox is my goto!
Worst case, you know Google will give you plenty of options and time to select a new provider if they did indeed shut down Google Drive.
The big losers here will be Dropbox, HubiC, Box, etc. who will feel price pressure.
Either way I like the competition and whichever one has better security would be my preference. But in terms of shutting down I think it's important to consider how they would shut down if they did, as much as 'if they would'.
It was pretty much the same story with Windows - as long as Apple was a viable competitor PC clones were pretty decent, but once Apple started going down the tubes you started getting bargain-basement Windows machines loaded up with crapware. The Apple/Google rivalry has been really good for consumers, as Apple forces Google to get better at user experience while Google forces Apple to be more open and support standards.
At what (little) it does, Dropbox does it very well, but for what little it does, I would definitely not call it cheap. Well worth it for some people, but very marginal for others like myself. I'm not aware of any new features coming out of Dropbox in well over a year, and there are many they could easily add, so as a matter of principle, I would change to a competitor provided their feature set and performance was at least as good, at the same or lower price..
There is no guarantee of course, in theory it could be replaced by a rebranded product with a completely incompatible API later on; but I doubt it would happen because it looks like Google already went through a spring cleaning of products, with the explicit aim of killing dying, orphaned products in order to strengthen the core products.
You absolutely do not know this. Dropbox could be acquired for $99999 Billion then closed in the next 6 months.
Dropbox could be acquired and shuttered (or worse, data-mined). Google - much less likely, though it does have a tendency to close projects it does't see as strategic.
I'd say the risks are equivalent. Hedge your bets, use multiple services and secure it all with something like Boxcryptor.
I'm more concerned with whether their software is any good. I tried it a while ago and it didn't even come to close to dropbox even in terms of syncing, let alone the other things that dropbox has done.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/
Google Reader was a _free_ application and like all _free_ applications, once they start losing money they are discontinued.
Feel free to quote me on this: Dropbox will not be Dropbox in five years. It will have been acquired, gone out of business, or at least slipped into irrelevance.
Dropbox does not stand a chance against competitors like Google, Microsoft or Apple.
If they dropped drive it would mean millions of chromebooks would be made almost useless.
If Drive is used by paid users, I think it won't go away anytime soon, just like Google Cloud or Gmail.
I'd toss google scholar into the ones you listed as well. A fantastic search tool, but (unless I'm missing something) it's completely buried away on their site.
We've been doing this since 2001. Email us about our HN discount.
1. Dropbox has a high potential to be acquired by a big company when the price is right.
2. Cloud storage service is something that you don't need to be attached to. Use Google till it's good. The day it isn't, simply switch to Dropbox or whatever.
You take a risk even if it does, because a company can change their business focus, or it can go out of business, or it can be acquired by another company that doesn't rely on the product, even if the acquired company did, and you have no control over any of those contingencies.
2. If Google shutters Google Drive you'll be able to get your data off of it and move it to another vendor's solution.
* no cloud service is guaranteed to exist in 5 years. * in case any of these services are shut down, it is very likely that they give you the option to download your stuff and use it in another service.
I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?
Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet.
Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are the ones that are visibly on the chopping block. You can see their agony from space.
Google Groups used to be huge, now to get to them you must click Apps -> More -> Even more from Google -> Scroll to the bottom of the page. It's 5th last. I expect them to announce it read-only within 2 years and totally closed within 5.
Google Finance was once the best stock screener and data-mine. Back in the day it was the only free service with real-time stock update. Google was proud to announce that and it was amazing. Today it still uses Flash, the stock screener is broken, portfolio's can barely be rearranged.
What guarantee do we have here? Why should I be more comfortable letting Google back up my stuff instead of Dropbox? I need a strong, material answer from Google on this question long before a few dollar bills become the important matter of distinction.
~~~
I'm sorry if I come off as scaremongering. The point I'm trying to make is that most people who want their data backed-up well, for a long time, probably care less about the exact dollar amount and more about (perceived) longevity of the service. Sometimes, Google exits markets for reasons that are unclear to many, and it needs to tangibly remedy that perception.