How Google Docs Killed GDrive

[riobard]

GDrive = “syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds” sounds exactly like Dropbox.

Apparently they are thinking too far ahead in the future where Internet connection is ubiquitous and super fast while ignoring the reality.

Dropbox's popularity proved GDrive would be a great product. I would guess the engineers at Google should be as good as, if not better than, guys at Dropbox. Given the planned launch time in 2008, it might very well kill Dropbox right at the beginning, or Dropbox might be a no-go for YC since Google would be doing it so good for free.

PS: Does anyone feel this is just internal politics to kill competing projects so his own project (Sundar is the lead of Chrome) can get more resources?

[dsplittgerber]

It's really interesting. When you read 'In the Plex' - which is superb and totally awesome -, there are several instances where you get the sense that Googlers are living in a kind of perfect bubble, shielding them from the kind of problems and hassles regular people have to deal with.

Things like super-fast wireless access (= 24/7 in the cloud) everywhere, being surrounded by like-minded rationalists etc. wind up hurting your products, as you cannot easily relate to the worldview of regular people anymore. Witness the launch of Buzz and it's default opt-in and several other privacy disasters - it made perfect rational sense to launch several features and products the way they were launched as it enhanced efficiency and ease of use etc. But no one at Google apparently thought about your abusive ex-boyfriend now being able to see your buzz activity etc - probably because for rational people such a scenario just isn't in the realm of scenarios one considers. But real life is messy that way.

This is perfectly understandable, though. From the book you get the sense that Googlers are in a way already living several years ahead of regular people, which shapes their products - in good and bad ways.

[chmike]

That's true, but we shouldn't forget that dropbox reached the point where it is today by a remarkable marketing execution, not only a good product.

[xtacy]

    "I don't think we need GDrive anymore." Horowitz
    asked why not. "Files are so 1990," said Pichai.
    "I don't think we need files anymore."

I wonder what they would think of that statement given Dropbox's adoption.

[wahnfrieden]

I don't doubt that they knew lots of people would use GDrive. It sounds like their decision to drop it ha more to do with it's impact on their other products, and to fit in with their longterm vision. Google Docs might not have met as much use if GDrive helped solve some of the problems with MS Office, for example. It also sets user expectations.

[tybris]

Because mr. Pichai is not such a visionary as he portrays himself as?

[neworbit]

Dear Google, you're doing it wrong. We understand that you would like google lockin on our file system, but the rest of us who do not necessarily have 24-7 100% reliable connectivity or prefer to work on things quietly offline (for instance, competing search technology) might think files resident somewhere else might not be so bad.

[wahnfrieden]

Google is adding back the offline support for Docs this summer (they had it before with Gears, but removed it). So your point is inaccurate soon enough.

[nezumi]

How would the GDrive help you with that?

[amorphid]

I've mostly stopped using Google Docs because MS Office + Dropbox is so much more handy in the majority of situations for me.

[magicalist]

"I don't think we need files anymore."

what does that even mean? even excusing the technical silliness of the statement, it's not even sound conceptually, unless "docs" are somehow not files. maybe, "we don't need a (hierarchical) file system"?

I also don't believe that "The service still doesn't offer a way to sync files" is true, incidentally. You could say that the service doesn't offer a pre-built, user-friendly way to sync files, but the documents API is pretty decent when I've used it (but maybe you can only sync docs, not any file?? a-ha!)

[derefr]

A "file", in almost all usage, refers to a specific kind of data structure: a stream of serialized data that presents random block-level access but which is most efficient when sequentially accessed, and which has a filesystem-defined structure of metadata attached that can be read more efficiently than reading a single block of the file (and is usually available even when the file isn't—e.g. when you don't have read permissions to the file.)

Google Docs has documents, but doesn't have files. iOS usually doesn't have files. Etc. It's not that the application-level services don't use files somewhere internally, but the fact that they do is an implementation detail, rather than an exposed part of the client protocol. Thus, Google could just as well store all your docs as structured data in a BigTable db (they probably do, actually), and you wouldn't know the difference.

[asmithmd1]

Hasn't the iPad abandoned files?

[yuhong]

Note that you can always import/export documents off Google Docs in another format.

[hnsmurf]

I suppose the fact that more people use Dropbox than Google Docs shows they overestimated the speed of the transition.

[Lmclean]

http://cyberduck.ch/ allows access to google docs via it's FTP client, pretty sweet.

I still prefer dropbox though but I use encrypted disk images for documents.

[bauchidgw]

so google docs is the google wave of file storage?

said that: i use google docs but i just love my dropbox (after i got rid of the growl spam the installed on my system)