They introduced a second 1 TB plan for twice the price with questionable added value except for Smart Sync and their offerings with more storage space are only made for teams.
Maybe it is time for me to switch away from Dropbox?
Previously, one of the main advantages of Dropbox was their reliable sync client but this attribute is fading away:
When I do many little file operations on Windows (npm, TeX Live), I expect to see MsMpEng.exe to eat away my CPU cycles. This is somewhat expected from an on demand antivirus scanner and as a Windows user it is somewhat common to whitelist some project folders or temporarily disable the AV before starting certain tasks.
On macOS the same thing happens thanks to Dropbox! Even outside of my Dropbox folder their sync client seems to intercept all file operations and do some CPU-heavy calculations on them. I don't know when this started and what the technical explanation for this is but at some time the Dropbox client on the Mac started to cause a system-wide performance regression.
What is the state of Google One sync client? In the past I read some bad reports about it but after several rebrandings maybe it has matured technically?
I haven't received obscure python error messages in awhile... but then that was because I switched to odrive as a sync client, about two years back. Really, Google Drive the website and storage service are both amazing, but the client apps? Not so much... At least they've a clear API (fourth gen now?) so third party apps are easily supported.
When you have two 'file monitoring' apps accessing each other's scan space, they can interpret each other's access as edits and go into a CPU loop. Dropbox and any other sync client will do this.
I generally look at AV as effectively useless and badly made, your system will speed up a lot in general (independent of dropbox) if you stop using it.
> Some third-party apps access files in your Dropbox folder. Dropbox may interpret this access as edits to the files, and sync these perceived changes. If a third-party app continually requests access to your files, Dropbox will continue to sync, which will in turn lead to high CPU usage.
> This loop usually occurs with third-party syncing apps, backup apps, and anti-virus or security software, or when a third-party app is installed within the Dropbox folder.
> Google already offered 24/7 support for paying business users with a G Suite account, but this is the first time it actively offers live support for consumers.
About fucking time.
I know so many people who will never purchase another Google product because it's was literally impossible to get another human being on the other end of the line.
I think providing supports to regular consumers may not have been in their dna, but I've been using the business chat/phone/email support through Google Apps, and they have always been top notch. While their answers weren't always what I wanted to hear, that was because of Google policy, versus the reps themselves. Most all of which have been very knowledgeable and human over the years versus most all of the other support channels I've used for companies other than Apple of course. However, there is an enormous amount of more consumers than business customers, so no idea how that support will scale, and if the consumers will get the same level of expertise as business but will be interesting to find out.
The cost of support has to come from somewhere -- is either Amazon or Google generally cheaper for cloud computing? (I know ~nothing in this area). I could definitely imagine a market for both a cheaper service that's lacking support and a more expensive one that offers increased support.
With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.
I wonder what they mean by Google experts. Will there be an actual human being or some hybrid solution at the end of the line? Not that it matters to me as long as it's efficient.
With Google Duplex I'm sure we're heading towards a future where a computer is going to be answering all our customer support calls without us knowing about it.
Google Duplex was a cool demo but those intents were quite well defined. There is a handful of form slots they are aiming to fill where they can enumerate all the entry points to a conversation as well as misinterpretations. I do agree that this is the direction we are going, however since Google Expert is a broad term tackling a much bigger search space, I'd expect it to work differently.
As an anecdotal counter point, the only thing I've ever bought from Google was a Glass as part of their explorers program. I had to get in contact with their customer support over an issue I was having and was blown away by how above and beyond they went.
I also had awesome support from the Glass Explorer program when the foil on mine started to peel. But, they charged $1500 for it and it felt like they really wanted it to succeed, so I would expect the support to be top notch. I'd love if they could bring that level of support to all their products.
They've offered chat and phone support for their phones and Google Play for years. I've never had a problem chatting or talking to a CSR on the phone. In fact, every Nexus and Pixel phone has a built in 24/7 support app that allows you to chat, talk or get a call back from a support person.
I've actually had great experience with Google Express support (when it was a subscription service; haven't needed to call support since it's gone free.)
I think Google's mostly got bad support for services (particularly free ones) whose scaling relied on near-zero marginal cost, and that is because scaling support isn't cheap even if scaling the underlying service is.
OTOH, if their storage charges are enough above costs to support the support burden for their consumer products for a customer, rolling consumer support into their storage plans resolved that scaling issue.
When on earth will Google give custom domains the full Google consumer experience? Like many people I did this before gsuite happened for my personal account and I'm happy to pay for this.
After having to change their name from Sky Drive to One Drive following a trademark dispute, I think maybe Microsoft might have something to say about Google calling their online storage solution "One" as well.
I mean come on, I know it's a very generic name, but it's nearly identical to one of their biggest competitors in this exact space.
I honestly cannot keep up with Google's constant brand churn. I have never heard of Android One. I'll probably forget what Google One is by next week, because it's just plans on Google Drive which itself was born out of Docs, and so on.
That's a massive trademark dispute waiting to happen. People will easily start assuming OneDrive refers to Google's offering and confuse the hell out of them.
It's not Google One for Google Drive. Its just Google One. (Yes, Google Drive is one of the other Google products that uses Google One storage but Google One is branding to detach the storsge space from the Drive brand, not connected to it.
“Sky” is not a name, it’s the blue thing up there. It's also "Microsoft SkyDrive" so it's hard to see an argument that someone would see this as a SkyTV offering.
> free one-tap access to Google Experts for help with any Google consumer product and service.
This is huge. Together with having removed ads that scanned your e-mail from consumer Gmail, it looks like Google's consumer offerings could actually be changing course from "you're the product" to "you're the customer" -- or at least be giving you the choice.
Of course, you could always get a single-seat G Suite for business account for $5 or $10/mo. with 24/7 phone support too, but it was a little too complicated and inflexible for most consumers.
Google one isn't a consumer product, just a payment plan, so it seems unlikely that the support is only for "google one". Google Drive is still Google Drive, not Google One.
I agree. And I think the branding here of "Google One" implies that this could be the start of a large change of course, since it's not specific to any one product.
While gmail support is notoriously awful, I've been extremely impressed with my call-in support for my Google Fi, Nexus phones, and Pixel buds. So when you pay for the product, they do (/can) support it well.
I would love a general paid-Google (a la Amazon Prime) plan, which aligns incentives a little better.
Anecdotally, I've been extremely unimpressed with Google's Fi / Nexus / Pixel support.
I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical.
Still, I called into Fi support. Not only were they completely unapologetic for the phone bricking, but they also had literally only one phone available for sale -- the new $700+ Pixel XL. I didn't want that phone. They offered no discount. Their answer was "you can wait a month until we get new phones". I had to buy a phone (grudgingly) from Verizon.
Overall, one of the worst experiences I've had with a Telecom company -- and it's not like I've had any experiences I would describe as "jolly".
I am a Project Fi customer that bought a Nexus 5X through them. After abotu 16 months of use, I ran into the well-documented "bootloop" issue that went along with these phones. They replaced the Nexus 5X with overnight shipping.
I experienced the same issue with the replacement device about 2 months after the original warranty expired. They replaced it out-of-warranty, with overnight shipping, for free.
Each time, I interacted with Project Fi support via web chat.
This is actually the exact experience I had, although I got 2-day shipping since they shipped to Ireland for me the first time, and Croatia the second time. It was exceptionally good service that I've yet to see paralleled anywhere else.
I've found them to be excellent the few times I've contacted them. They even debugged some networking issues within a few hours when my phone was having trouble switching to a Japanese data network, all while keeping me updated on their progress. The Fi vs every other carrier delta is the primary thing keeping me from an iPhone. I've been a bit less impressed with the hardware reliability of the Pixel, and Android's software experience isn't quite as good as iOS'.
"I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical."
I had the same exact issue with my Pixel XL. I did buy it used, so yeah I know.
I just set the phone down, it looked like it froze and rebooted, but the screen just turned off and that was it. That was a month after the warranty expired. I'm on my second one, so we'll see how this goes.
There is always a reason for everything with Google. They didn't provide support for years. Considering what they showed lately with restaurant booking, what I think is actually happening is that Google want a huge data set for support calls/chats to use it as training data for their ML systems. Then they will present fully featured customer support product based on ML.
imho, creating new data sucking pipelines (no matter whether for advertising or model training) under the guise of a consumer service is at least slightly nefarious.
I've heard the "this call is recorded for training" message for decades. Now it's training a machine algorithm instead of a human one. Nothing really changed.
This was my first thought as well. Not a bad way to go about it, too. Maybe they'll get some data about which knowledge base articles aren't helpful, too.
1800MICROSOFT (which interestingly works, despite being 13 digits) is just a call center in india, however they seem to be at least somewhat knowledgeable. I haven't called them in probably around 9-10 years but I remember they would remotely control my PC and run commands in the command prompt (which doesn't mean much if they're just following a script but they seemed to be able to at least somewhat interpret the results). If the L1 tech can't solve your problem you get escalated to someone who is smarter (And these people definitely knew what they were talking about).
I believe you get three free calls for every licence you buy (home/basic licences only get one or get none, depending on the product).
*This is all based off of my experience from many years ago so it might not be true any more.
So, I've never been able to figure this out. If you pay for single-seat G-suite (using my personal @gmail.com address) does it also eliminate ads in gmail, etc (obviously not on search)?
> Initially, Google One will only be available on a limited basis. If you have a paid Drive storage plan, you’ll be automatically upgraded to Google One over the coming months.
Look out for an email with details on your new benefits.
I've been using https://github.com/odeke-em/drive for awhile without issues, originally written by a Googler. I've also heard good things about insync.
Seconded. I hate these kind of vague announcements. Best I can tell is it's Drive plus... something? Hard to get excited when you don't know what it is.
So wasabi (a Gdrive competitor) dropped their egress fees. So it's just $4.99/TB flat rate. It doesn't surprise me that google wants to change it's pricing structure.
> In addition to access to experts, the company also promises to provide subscribers with other benefits. Google One’s director Larissa Fontaine told me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, preferred rates for other Google services, or credits on Google Play. “We hope to build those out over time,” she noted.
Giving you discounts if you use google search. Not sure they are using their search dominance innovatively or abusing it to promote this.
Can we get Family Groups enabled for G Suite accounts? My family is on a G Suite account and it is frustrating being unable to take advantage of any Family features (sharing purchases, music, etc).
I'm happy to see the 200 GB plan. I use Google Drive instead of Dropbox because I only have ~70 GB of data. Now if I hit the 100 GB limit, I can just pay for an extra 100 GB instead of having to go all the way up to 1 TB. I don't understand why Dropbox doesn't offer more pricing tiers. I'd happily switch since unlike Google Drive, they have an official Linux client.
I am somewhat worried about Dropbox. They are giving every indication of trying to "pivot" away from file storage into some kind of unwanted "shared collaboration space" where I can "unleash the creativity of my team" or what not. Just check out their company blurb:
> Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork-so you can focus on the things that matter. Sign in and put your creative energy to work.
I like the pricing model, but why couldn't this just be an upgrade to Google Drive?
On second thought, why couldn't this be a $9.99 a month bundle of YouTube Red, 1TB Google Drive, Google Play Music, some Google Voice credits, and add free Google Search?
Yes, your area does matter. In some countries, there are requirements that your data be housed in a data center in your country. They may not have this option yet.
203 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadMaybe it is time for me to switch away from Dropbox?
Previously, one of the main advantages of Dropbox was their reliable sync client but this attribute is fading away: When I do many little file operations on Windows (npm, TeX Live), I expect to see MsMpEng.exe to eat away my CPU cycles. This is somewhat expected from an on demand antivirus scanner and as a Windows user it is somewhat common to whitelist some project folders or temporarily disable the AV before starting certain tasks. On macOS the same thing happens thanks to Dropbox! Even outside of my Dropbox folder their sync client seems to intercept all file operations and do some CPU-heavy calculations on them. I don't know when this started and what the technical explanation for this is but at some time the Dropbox client on the Mac started to cause a system-wide performance regression.
What is the state of Google One sync client? In the past I read some bad reports about it but after several rebrandings maybe it has matured technically?
I generally look at AV as effectively useless and badly made, your system will speed up a lot in general (independent of dropbox) if you stop using it.
> Some third-party apps access files in your Dropbox folder. Dropbox may interpret this access as edits to the files, and sync these perceived changes. If a third-party app continually requests access to your files, Dropbox will continue to sync, which will in turn lead to high CPU usage.
> This loop usually occurs with third-party syncing apps, backup apps, and anti-virus or security software, or when a third-party app is installed within the Dropbox folder.
> https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/high-cpu-usage
About fucking time.
I know so many people who will never purchase another Google product because it's was literally impossible to get another human being on the other end of the line.
With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.
They've offered chat and phone support for their phones and Google Play for years. I've never had a problem chatting or talking to a CSR on the phone. In fact, every Nexus and Pixel phone has a built in 24/7 support app that allows you to chat, talk or get a call back from a support person.
I think Google's mostly got bad support for services (particularly free ones) whose scaling relied on near-zero marginal cost, and that is because scaling support isn't cheap even if scaling the underlying service is.
OTOH, if their storage charges are enough above costs to support the support burden for their consumer products for a customer, rolling consumer support into their storage plans resolved that scaling issue.
I mean come on, I know it's a very generic name, but it's nearly identical to one of their biggest competitors in this exact space.
Google One
...
Both in storage?
That's a massive trademark dispute waiting to happen. People will easily start assuming OneDrive refers to Google's offering and confuse the hell out of them.
I don't see that happening here.
Did I do it right?
This is huge. Together with having removed ads that scanned your e-mail from consumer Gmail, it looks like Google's consumer offerings could actually be changing course from "you're the product" to "you're the customer" -- or at least be giving you the choice.
Of course, you could always get a single-seat G Suite for business account for $5 or $10/mo. with 24/7 phone support too, but it was a little too complicated and inflexible for most consumers.
It's a paid consumer product whose core element is storage space for use with other Google services.
While gmail support is notoriously awful, I've been extremely impressed with my call-in support for my Google Fi, Nexus phones, and Pixel buds. So when you pay for the product, they do (/can) support it well.
I would love a general paid-Google (a la Amazon Prime) plan, which aligns incentives a little better.
I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical.
Still, I called into Fi support. Not only were they completely unapologetic for the phone bricking, but they also had literally only one phone available for sale -- the new $700+ Pixel XL. I didn't want that phone. They offered no discount. Their answer was "you can wait a month until we get new phones". I had to buy a phone (grudgingly) from Verizon.
Overall, one of the worst experiences I've had with a Telecom company -- and it's not like I've had any experiences I would describe as "jolly".
I experienced the same issue with the replacement device about 2 months after the original warranty expired. They replaced it out-of-warranty, with overnight shipping, for free.
Each time, I interacted with Project Fi support via web chat.
I had the same exact issue with my Pixel XL. I did buy it used, so yeah I know. I just set the phone down, it looked like it froze and rebooted, but the screen just turned off and that was it. That was a month after the warranty expired. I'm on my second one, so we'll see how this goes.
At least for partners. I haven’t had much experience with regular end-user support, so I won’t make any bold claims about that.
I believe you get three free calls for every licence you buy (home/basic licences only get one or get none, depending on the product).
*This is all based off of my experience from many years ago so it might not be true any more.
You need your own domain to be able to use G Suite.
To answer your question: I don't recall ever seeing ads on the Gmail interfaces of any of my G Suite email accounts.
You can disable scrapping though. Ie you get generic ads
> Initially, Google One will only be available on a limited basis. If you have a paid Drive storage plan, you’ll be automatically upgraded to Google One over the coming months. Look out for an email with details on your new benefits.
edit: Maybe more of a compilation of google apps for business with drive?
It's being rebranded to separate it from Drive.
And they have firm plans to make it family-shareable soon, and less firm plans to bundle other ancillary benefits with it down the line.
Giving you discounts if you use google search. Not sure they are using their search dominance innovatively or abusing it to promote this.
Not sure how the new support feature compares to free/paid Apple support options. Not a lot of details on it yet.
Not trying to shill this crypto(because I dont know if it really works). But this crypto claims to be selling 1TB/2$/mo
https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
So is Sia coin actually cheaper than these big players? Or are there hidden fees?
Sounds like you have your answer?
I dont think its fair to make a conclusion without having evidence.
But... but... but... Apple is always more expensive than Google! I'm just paying for the brand!
> Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork-so you can focus on the things that matter. Sign in and put your creative energy to work.
NOOO!!!! Just store my files damn it!
On second thought, why couldn't this be a $9.99 a month bundle of YouTube Red, 1TB Google Drive, Google Play Music, some Google Voice credits, and add free Google Search?
> It’s also rebranding these storage plans (but not Google Drive itself) as “Google One.”
> Google will upgrade all existing storage plans to Google One accounts
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google-one/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238
What does my area have to do with an online storage offering? I'm not giving them my zipcode.
Anyway, taking all bets on whether this doppelganger will be killed off, or whether two more doppelgangers will be launched.