9 ms·

Google One

246 points by binaryanomaly 8y ago

izzydata 8y ago
But can I use it as an image host like Dropbox public folders used to be? Can it sync a folder from my computer like Dropbox does? The actual amount of space is so trivial compared to my many terabytes of storage so that is not a useful feature for me.
sccxy 8y ago
Google OneDrive?
- Matthias247 8y ago
  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).
  - hawkweed 8y ago
    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.
floatingatoll 8y ago
Their support site is far more valuable than the landing page. From the main support index at https://support.google.com/googleone/ 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): "Get Google One": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013 > With Google One, you get more storage, help from experts, and extra member benefits. You can share your membership with up to 5 family members. "How your existing storage works with Google One": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014 > You'll get storage through your Google One membership, which will become your new storage limit. You'll no longer buy storage through Google Drive. "Claim a Benefit": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266 > Google One hotel deals depend on the day, time, and other factors. There might not be a deal for every hotel search. https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668 "Learn where Google One is available": > Create or join a family; Use Google Play Family Library; Subscribe to the Google Play Music family plan; Use a family calendar
- tmoravec 8y ago
  How on Earth are hotel discounts related to cloud storage?
  - codebeaker 8y ago
    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.
    - nolok 8y ago
      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.
      - floatingatoll 8y ago
        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.
pstuart 8y ago
That landing page was too busy and did a weak job at selling what "one" was if it's really more than a cheaper drop box. Expert access for $1.99/mo? Huh?
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  By the end of the page, I wasn't even sure what "one" is.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
    Thanks, I thought I was dumb for feeling exactly the same after seeing the page. Is it that hard to include a sentence of the form "$PRODUCT is..." somewhere?
- sharmi 8y ago
  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. Don't worry, It will, too, pass.
- jansan 8y ago
  I am really wondering if there is any person on this whole planet who visits the page and thinks: "Wow, I want that!".
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  $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.
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  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.
amingilani 8y ago
I'm confused. What is it? A storage bump? Paid support? A discount plan? A consolidation of all these offerings from different places into one home? This is such a bad landing page. I have more questions than answers.
- zamalek 8y ago
  Based on what I know about it, it's a one subscription plan for everything. Storage, mail, photos, music, videos, everything.
- eganist 8y ago
  It's a googlier Google. It's Extra Google. Could've been called Google Extra, but the word Extra has a negative connotation to it at this time. ...actually, even that interpretation seems applicable here.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    It’s, like, Google plus more Google. What else would you possibly call that?
    - tcmb 8y ago
      Google+? No, wait...
- paxys 8y ago
  Why not actually read the page? Google One includes 100 GB storage Access to Google experts Option to add your family Extra member benefits
  - thefounder 8y ago
    Google experts?
    - ncr100 8y ago
bmiranda 8y ago
For a moment I thought it was going to be another chat app. Instead it's... something? A one sentence description at the beginning of the page wouldn't hurt...
- shpx 8y ago
  Compare with https://www.dropbox.com/ https://www.dropbox.com/
  - bad_user 8y ago
    Is Dropbox supposed to be a better example? I find their homepage horrible. "Dropbox is a modern workspace" "Keep everything organized without breaking your flow" I don't understand why these companies feel the need to describe their services in this way.
    - callalex 8y ago
      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.
      - rrdharan 8y ago
        Neither Dropbox nor Google is particularly concerned with courting VC money.
        callalex 8y ago
        You're right. I should have just said "investor money"
      - golergka 8y ago
        But that's a customer landing page, not "investors" page
ronilan 8y ago
Remember that billboard puzzle google put up in 2004? I think this might be the same thing. If you can figure out what Google One is you are a genius!
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  Thank you.
mongol 8y ago
After Google Plus comes Google One
iandanforth 8y ago
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?
sharmi 8y ago
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.
- ahofmann 8y ago
  > I have managed to setup a upload workflow for Backblaze on my linux machine without going through a browser. Would it be possible for you to share your way of doing this? I would be very interested in B2 access without browser.
  - codegladiator 8y ago
    rclone supports B2 https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone
  - vasili111 8y ago
    Duplicati 2. It is still beta but quite stable.
  - digianarchist 8y ago
    Arq supports B2.
- ProAm 8y ago
  > + Customer Service My skeptical meter just went off the charts.
sigi45 8y ago
That is launched for a while now. What is new from that page?
mesozoic 8y ago
Yeah it's confusing but give them a break it's their first try. Maybe they'll make it make more sense by Google two.
ndnxhs 8y ago
So now we are going to get 5 copy's of Google drive..
cbg0 8y ago
Not sure what all the hate is about, I quickly figured out they were looking to sell me more storage space, though I do admit the page is really busy.
chucky 8y ago
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?
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Its google drive but developed by a different team.
ohazi 8y ago
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?"
- omeid2 8y ago
  I think one way to stop people asking "when will this be closed down?" is to keep them wondering "what is this?".
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  The primary benefit that this is based around (increased account storage space) is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.
  - mikro2nd 8y ago
    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.
gamegoblin 8y ago
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. Aren't things usually cheaper when you buy bulk?
- sigi45 8y ago
  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.
  - nolok 8y ago
    They're not doing mix calculation they're aligning themselves to the market, aka Dropbox, while doubling the space offered.
    - r3bl 8y ago
      It's way more than doubling. Dropbox offers 1TB for $10 and 2TB for $20. Google added another zero (10x as much for the same price). Dropbox was definitely the first to offer a viable cloud storage, but they've always offered laughable storage plans (compared to their competition).
      - dwild 8y ago
        > 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?
- remus 8y ago
  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
obilgic 8y ago
Is this to compete with Amazon Prime?
SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
This “One” thing is getting a bit tired.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  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.
  - Nition 8y ago
    Call it the Mac Two and suddenly the whole market perceives you as one step ahead.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    "XBox One X". Maybe we'll start going with Roman numberals: Xbox One One, Xbox one one one, xbox One V, ... Xbox MCMLXXXVIII
MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
I just asked my girlfriend of several years to be in my family. We'll see how this goes.
bad_user 8y ago
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?
- adjkant 8y ago
  I think you answered your own question - it's not targeting power users. IMO it's targeting a few groups: - Grandpa who wants to see all the family photos and is not completely behind technically - Grandpa's kids who are tired of being tech support for him and also probably have lots of photos they would happily store with Google - Generally, people 30-50 who want simple "just works" tech and probably will use the hotel discounts
wodenokoto 8y ago
A lot of people are saying the page is really busy. Visiting on mobile (Firefox) this is probably one of the quietest landing pages I've seen: A logo A headline Two short sentences A sign up box A note saying that paying customers will eventually automatically be upgraded. That's it. No pictures. No movies. No backgrounds. No parallax. No nothing. Did they completely change the landing page since this was posted 20 minutes ago?
- binaryanomaly 8y ago
  Hmm it looks quite different here. Lots of pics, etc.
- zyx321 8y ago
  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.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    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. I'm visiting from Scandinavia.
- microdrum 8y ago
  They have now completely removed the landing page because of how hard we are laughing at them: https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3
CSMastermind 8y ago
This is Google's version of Amazon Prime right?
bad_user 8y ago
How does sharing of space work? Say if you get the 2 TB plan, will each family member get 2 TB, or will that 2 TB be shared between all family members?
zuck9 8y ago
Previous thread from 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168
jhanschoo 8y ago
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.
neverminder 8y ago
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.
- hodyroff 8y ago
  For flexibility there is ownCloud. Build your own, where you want, has Linux and all the stuff you need.
  - smartbit 8y ago
    I'd suggest NextCloud instead. Including Two Factor Authentication in the latest release https://nextcloud.com/blog/next-generation-2-factor-authentication-and-security-hardening/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/next-generation-2-factor-authenti...
    - metildaa 8y ago
      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.
      - abricot 8y ago
        Are you arguing that Owncloud is better?
        metildaa 8y ago
        Nope, its been years since I last used a friend's Owncloud server. Has it improved?
brenschluss 8y ago
Prediction: this will shut down in 2.75 years.
- oscar_wong67 8y ago
  Could be sooner, even
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  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.
Havoc 8y ago
Is this something I can change my g suite to? Or is this a personal offering? Would love the google play etc but need g suite forown domain email
- alexcason 8y ago
  Looks like personal accounts only.
Zenst 8y ago
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
- bad_user 8y ago
  Actually it's available in Romania too, I noticed that today, that list is outdated.
chillydawg 8y ago
Can I pay more to stop Google advertising to me and collecting my data? They can keep their HDD space.
- jstanley 8y ago
  Yes, you can buy your own hard disks and not use Google.
  - piyush_soni 8y ago
    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.
    - kmlx 8y ago
      GSuite?
      - piyush_soni 8y ago
        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?
    - jstanley 8y ago
      That's basically what nextcloud is trying to be, although I don't think it's there yet.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  You don't have to pay for that. You can just turn it off.
spyckie2 8y ago
"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.
- mtgx 8y ago
  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.
- iKevinShah 8y ago
  Most probably they'll follow the path like other products have followed: Google Keep -> Keep -> Keep Notes -> Notes (In near future)
  - powercf 8y ago
    Google One ⇒ One ⇒ One Two ⇒ Two?
    - welly 8y ago
      They must be using a roadie for their product naming.
    - the_duke 8y ago
      More like: Google One => One => Google => product canceled
Animats 8y ago
Looking forward to "Google Plus One".
Insanity 8y ago
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? :)
- mkj 8y ago
  Arq Backup works well as long as you remember your passphrase.
- ztjio 8y ago
  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.
- vwelling 8y ago
  Quite happy with Backblaze for exactly this reason, as it allows you to set your own private encryption key. That they're quite reasonably priced doesn't hurt either :)
- Gnurou 8y ago
  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.
- kmlx 8y ago
  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.
  - pjc50 8y ago
iamben 8y ago
I pay 2 quid a month for extra Gmail storage (20gb) and nothing else... Does this get rolled into that?!
Jaruzel 8y ago
I've just tried to share this link to a friend over WhatsApp. WhatsApp will NOT show a link preview for it, like it does for all other URLs. Is WhatsApp blocking link previews for Google services?
- callalex 8y ago
  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...
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    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).
- jeklj 8y ago
  Come on
unixhero 8y ago
Okay. Another product they will sunset after 5 3-8 years.
lmedinas 8y ago
For that price i would not mind to get a subscription if it would be fully encrypted and a good messaging app unlike the hangouts and allo trash.
malux85 8y ago
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. No thanks.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  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.
  - wstrange 8y ago
    My biggest fear is accidentally losing or deleting all my family photos. I don't trust myself to run proper backups and archival. I think the average consumer is in the same boat. They want someone else to take care of this problem.
- nwellnhof 8y ago
  They could win privacy-conscious users back by offering an ad and tracking free Google experience with the paid plans.
  - Jnr 8y ago
    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.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    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
xnb11 8y ago
This page looks like http://hooli.com/ http://hooli.com/ . Google does seem to have a sense of humor. It is amazing how Google screws up any UI or explanatory pages apart from search. I guess common sense isn't taught in CLRS.
- kkrbalam 8y ago
  lol!!!
onyva 8y ago
Does anybody really trust google with any of their services? It’s here today gone tomorrow.
- zengineer 8y ago
  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.
- danso 8y ago
  Doesn’t seem to be the case with either GMail or Drive.
- dwild 8y ago
  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. They added the client support, that's all.
Proven 8y ago
Thanks but I have a ton of cap at home, as well as a convenient and secure way to access it remotely
zwaps 8y ago
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...
- dwild 8y ago
  Encrypt your data yourself and don't trust any cloud provider to do it for you. You can only trust yourself.
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    That's the complain: they could do it, and be liable for it, if they wanted, and still be profitable.
sensecall 8y ago
I have almost no idea what the offering is here... can someone explain?
audiolion 8y ago
Google One, and Google Drive.. why not just merge the products and call it OneDrive?
projectramo 8y ago
Easy with the criticism folks. This is just the first version. All the confusion will disappear with Google One 2.0
- tfeldmann 8y ago
  I'll wait for Google One 2.3
  - tremblane 8y ago
    Is that the release where it's specialized for certain groups? Like, "Google One 2.3 for businesses"
    - snaky 8y ago
      Well, it's still better than "Google One 2.3 Tab S3 Plus 10.1 (EU ver), with stylus"
- rdsubhas 8y ago
  You mean Google Two. Or maybe one Google One will be deprecated in favor of two Google Twos.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    All three will come preinstalled with Android phones at the same time.
- jrnichols 8y ago
  I figured that it would be Google One (beta) for 7 years first.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  I'll wait for Google One Lollipop.
- Svoka 8y ago
  I'll wait for Google One 4.3 API 34 Nobby Nobbs 17.3.1 Libraries 12.22
seanhunter 8y ago
The prize will go to the first person to build a full von Neumann machine using Google One and Coke Zero.
darkstar_16 8y ago
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?
kylehotchkiss 8y ago
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.
- timdavila 8y ago
  If they're not very clearly stating the opposite, the answer should be assumed to be yes they are monetizing it.
manigandham 8y ago
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.
abalos 8y ago
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.
- laputan_machine 8y ago
  Less bureaucracy, more bike-shedding, but yes, I agree (from experience!).
buboard 8y ago
Also consider Google Eye as a good candidate name,
jeklj 8y ago
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
ashelmire 8y ago
Scrolled down the home page and have no idea what the product is. Is this a rebrand of google drive?
futurix 8y ago
"One" - sure sign of a branding failure.
imgabe 8y ago
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.
- tacomonstrous 8y ago
  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.
- elagost 8y ago
  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/ https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-linux-ext4-only/ NextCloud and a $5/mo VPS work great for me.
ryandvm 8y ago
> You're currently signed in to your G Suite account. Switch to your personal Google Account to upgrade. Ugh... Google never misses an opportunity to shit on its most ardent supporters - the people with personal G-Suite domains.
- NiekvdMaas 8y ago
  Very true, this is the case among many of their products. For example Google Home is not fully working on G Suite accounts, ridiculous.
  - roganartu 8y ago
    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.
- Sargos 8y ago
  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.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    The pedantry doesn't help the customer. Your correction reminds me of the bureaucracy in the movie Brazil. Reasons may be justified internally but a shitty experience for customers is still a shitty experience.
- buro9 8y ago
  I have just completed a migration... here's my guide and the background: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d2929066951 https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906... 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.
IgorPartola 8y ago
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.
- mtgx 8y ago
  How else would the people proposing and working on these things internally get promotions?
- marcodave 8y ago
  I've learned here in HN, that's how you get promoted in Google
dbg31415 8y ago
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.
_JasonE 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
falcor84 8y ago
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.
- gedy 8y ago
  I'm confident that's company politics and bonuses for launching the "new" at play here.
whalesalad 8y ago
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.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
Can someone explain to me why google really wants me to move my photos out of Drive and into Google Photos? What’s in it for them?
- catacombs 8y ago
  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.
- misterdoubt 8y ago
  Google Photos is a key source of data for their work on image processing, classification, etc...
atomisonline 8y ago
Nice, I can't wait to put everything on my One Drive....wait a minute...
jimijazz 8y ago
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.
eximius 8y ago
Hm, does this solve the 'consumer-level support' (or lack thereof) problem? I can't tell if the experts are essentially human tutorials or if they can actually escalate issues.
sansopticon 8y ago
One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
shashankjain16 8y ago
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.
- dwild 8y ago
  > 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.
  - shashankjain16 8y ago
    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.
roland35 8y ago
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!
- OafTobark 8y ago
  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.
acdha 8y ago
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.
- jeremy7600 8y ago
  Advertising service.
TootsMagoon 8y ago
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.
- mda 8y ago
  I hear this often but usually lacks explanation, can you elaborate?
  - blairbeckwith 8y ago
    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.
sidcool 8y ago
If I opt for Google One, does Google stop using my Drive contents for ad targeting?
malchow 8y ago
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!
- tln 8y ago
  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.
ChrisArchitect 8y ago
what the hell -- this is like 7 months ago news/rolled out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306
iamgopal 8y ago
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.
iamgopal 8y ago
Just tell me it's encrypted and even we can not see your data.
hateful 8y ago
(GoogleDrive) + (OneDrive) = (Google*One)
digitalsanctum 8y ago
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?
arbitrage 8y ago
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. Thanks, but you need to grow up a bit, Google.
- dmix 8y ago
  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.
  - nathas 8y ago
    > This isn't some side project like Wave that they'll cut off. Wave was launched to a ton of fan-fare and seemed like a first-order product, similar to Hangouts... which is now also dying a slow death.
  - microdrum 8y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure that they won't cut it off. For example, they have already removed the marketing page that people here are making fun of: https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3
    - dmix 8y ago
      Ha, amazing. Not only are they bad at it, they are thin-skinned too.
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    I've had pretty good luck with apps like songshift to migrate between services. It's never %100, but pretty decent.
dmix 8y ago
Is there any new software released with this for syncing/uploading all of your files to Google One? Edit: looks like they only have a web app for desktop and only have an app for Android, no iPhone support yet: https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app Without syncing like MEGASync or Dropbox (even if it's only one way uploading) this is pretty useless as a central repository.
tambourine_man 8y ago
Flickery mobile page. Tap menu bar to scroll up doesn’t work.
eftpotrm 8y ago
"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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- freehunter 8y ago
  >for most uses >100GB in one week 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".
  - eftpotrm 8y ago
    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'.
pleasecalllater 8y ago
What's the removal date for this service?
OafTobark 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
horatiocain 8y ago
It'll be shut down in two years...
microdrum 8y ago
What a joke. Now they have pulled the marketing page -- possibly because of how hard we are laughing at them. https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 Every new storage product offered by Google serves mostly to remind people to get their stuff off of Google.
timdellinger 8y ago
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".
mugwort13 8y ago
I have no idea where they got the idea for this. None. https://www.zoho.com/one/ https://www.zoho.com/one/
illusiveworm 8y ago
It baffles me that people willingly give their data to Google. Not only that, but some pay for it too.
kgwxd 8y ago
Google OneDrive
fredsanford 8y ago
Maybe it has something to do with one being the rough average number of testicles in the human population?
moretosee 8y ago
it may shutdown down the road. you never know
jeisc 8y ago
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?
karmakaze 8y ago
> One The number of baskets to put all your eggs into.
Svoka 8y ago
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.

246 points by binaryanomaly 8y ago

But can I use it as an image host like Dropbox public folders used to be? Can it sync a folder from my computer like Dropbox does? The actual amount of space is so trivial compared to my many terabytes of storage so that is not a useful feature for me.

sccxy 8y ago

Google OneDrive?

Matthias247 8y ago
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).
- hawkweed 8y ago
  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.

floatingatoll 8y ago

Their support site is far more valuable than the landing page. From the main support index at https://support.google.com/googleone/ 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): "Get Google One": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013 > With Google One, you get more storage, help from experts, and extra member benefits. You can share your membership with up to 5 family members. "How your existing storage works with Google One": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014 > You'll get storage through your Google One membership, which will become your new storage limit. You'll no longer buy storage through Google Drive. "Claim a Benefit": https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266 > Google One hotel deals depend on the day, time, and other factors. There might not be a deal for every hotel search. https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668 https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668 "Learn where Google One is available": > Create or join a family; Use Google Play Family Library; Subscribe to the Google Play Music family plan; Use a family calendar

tmoravec 8y ago
How on Earth are hotel discounts related to cloud storage?
- codebeaker 8y ago
  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.
  - nolok 8y ago
    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.
    - floatingatoll 8y ago
      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.

pstuart 8y ago

That landing page was too busy and did a weak job at selling what "one" was if it's really more than a cheaper drop box. Expert access for $1.99/mo? Huh?

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
By the end of the page, I wasn't even sure what "one" is.
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
  Thanks, I thought I was dumb for feeling exactly the same after seeing the page. Is it that hard to include a sentence of the form "$PRODUCT is..." somewhere?
sharmi 8y ago
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. Don't worry, It will, too, pass.
jansan 8y ago
I am really wondering if there is any person on this whole planet who visits the page and thinks: "Wow, I want that!".
siruncledrew 8y ago
$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.
PurpleRamen 8y ago
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.

amingilani 8y ago

I'm confused. What is it? A storage bump? Paid support? A discount plan? A consolidation of all these offerings from different places into one home? This is such a bad landing page. I have more questions than answers.

zamalek 8y ago
Based on what I know about it, it's a one subscription plan for everything. Storage, mail, photos, music, videos, everything.
eganist 8y ago
It's a googlier Google. It's Extra Google. Could've been called Google Extra, but the word Extra has a negative connotation to it at this time. ...actually, even that interpretation seems applicable here.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  It’s, like, Google plus more Google. What else would you possibly call that?
  - tcmb 8y ago
    Google+? No, wait...
paxys 8y ago
Why not actually read the page? Google One includes 100 GB storage Access to Google experts Option to add your family Extra member benefits
- thefounder 8y ago
  Google experts?
  - ncr100 8y ago

bmiranda 8y ago

For a moment I thought it was going to be another chat app. Instead it's... something? A one sentence description at the beginning of the page wouldn't hurt...

shpx 8y ago
Compare with https://www.dropbox.com/ https://www.dropbox.com/
- bad_user 8y ago
  Is Dropbox supposed to be a better example? I find their homepage horrible. "Dropbox is a modern workspace" "Keep everything organized without breaking your flow" I don't understand why these companies feel the need to describe their services in this way.
  - callalex 8y ago
    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.
    - rrdharan 8y ago
      Neither Dropbox nor Google is particularly concerned with courting VC money.
      - callalex 8y ago
        You're right. I should have just said "investor money"
    - golergka 8y ago
      But that's a customer landing page, not "investors" page

ronilan 8y ago

Remember that billboard puzzle google put up in 2004? I think this might be the same thing. If you can figure out what Google One is you are a genius!

kowdermeister 8y ago
Thank you.

mongol 8y ago

After Google Plus comes Google One

iandanforth 8y ago

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?

sharmi 8y ago

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.

ahofmann 8y ago
> I have managed to setup a upload workflow for Backblaze on my linux machine without going through a browser. Would it be possible for you to share your way of doing this? I would be very interested in B2 access without browser.
- codegladiator 8y ago
  rclone supports B2 https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone
- vasili111 8y ago
  Duplicati 2. It is still beta but quite stable.
- digianarchist 8y ago
  Arq supports B2.
ProAm 8y ago
> + Customer Service My skeptical meter just went off the charts.

sigi45 8y ago

That is launched for a while now. What is new from that page?

mesozoic 8y ago

Yeah it's confusing but give them a break it's their first try. Maybe they'll make it make more sense by Google two.

ndnxhs 8y ago

So now we are going to get 5 copy's of Google drive..

cbg0 8y ago

Not sure what all the hate is about, I quickly figured out they were looking to sell me more storage space, though I do admit the page is really busy.

chucky 8y ago

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?

ndnxhs 8y ago
Its google drive but developed by a different team.

ohazi 8y ago

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?"

omeid2 8y ago
I think one way to stop people asking "when will this be closed down?" is to keep them wondering "what is this?".
jhanschoo 8y ago
The primary benefit that this is based around (increased account storage space) is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  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.

gamegoblin 8y ago

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. Aren't things usually cheaper when you buy bulk?

sigi45 8y ago
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.
- nolok 8y ago
  They're not doing mix calculation they're aligning themselves to the market, aka Dropbox, while doubling the space offered.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    It's way more than doubling. Dropbox offers 1TB for $10 and 2TB for $20. Google added another zero (10x as much for the same price). Dropbox was definitely the first to offer a viable cloud storage, but they've always offered laughable storage plans (compared to their competition).
    - dwild 8y ago
      > 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?
remus 8y ago
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

obilgic 8y ago

Is this to compete with Amazon Prime?

SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago

This “One” thing is getting a bit tired.

Apocryphon 8y ago
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.
- Nition 8y ago
  Call it the Mac Two and suddenly the whole market perceives you as one step ahead.
- pjc50 8y ago
  "XBox One X". Maybe we'll start going with Roman numberals: Xbox One One, Xbox one one one, xbox One V, ... Xbox MCMLXXXVIII

MithrilTuxedo 8y ago

I just asked my girlfriend of several years to be in my family. We'll see how this goes.

bad_user 8y ago

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?

adjkant 8y ago
I think you answered your own question - it's not targeting power users. IMO it's targeting a few groups: - Grandpa who wants to see all the family photos and is not completely behind technically - Grandpa's kids who are tired of being tech support for him and also probably have lots of photos they would happily store with Google - Generally, people 30-50 who want simple "just works" tech and probably will use the hotel discounts

wodenokoto 8y ago

A lot of people are saying the page is really busy. Visiting on mobile (Firefox) this is probably one of the quietest landing pages I've seen: A logo A headline Two short sentences A sign up box A note saying that paying customers will eventually automatically be upgraded. That's it. No pictures. No movies. No backgrounds. No parallax. No nothing. Did they completely change the landing page since this was posted 20 minutes ago?

binaryanomaly 8y ago
Hmm it looks quite different here. Lots of pics, etc.
zyx321 8y ago
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.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  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. I'm visiting from Scandinavia.
microdrum 8y ago
They have now completely removed the landing page because of how hard we are laughing at them: https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3

CSMastermind 8y ago

This is Google's version of Amazon Prime right?

bad_user 8y ago

How does sharing of space work? Say if you get the 2 TB plan, will each family member get 2 TB, or will that 2 TB be shared between all family members?

zuck9 8y ago

Previous thread from 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168

jhanschoo 8y ago

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.

neverminder 8y ago

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.

hodyroff 8y ago
For flexibility there is ownCloud. Build your own, where you want, has Linux and all the stuff you need.
- smartbit 8y ago
  I'd suggest NextCloud instead. Including Two Factor Authentication in the latest release https://nextcloud.com/blog/next-generation-2-factor-authentication-and-security-hardening/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/next-generation-2-factor-authenti...
  - metildaa 8y ago
    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.
    - abricot 8y ago
      Are you arguing that Owncloud is better?
      - metildaa 8y ago
        Nope, its been years since I last used a friend's Owncloud server. Has it improved?

brenschluss 8y ago

Prediction: this will shut down in 2.75 years.

oscar_wong67 8y ago
Could be sooner, even
jasonvorhe 8y ago
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.

Havoc 8y ago

Is this something I can change my g suite to? Or is this a personal offering? Would love the google play etc but need g suite forown domain email

alexcason 8y ago
Looks like personal accounts only.

Zenst 8y ago

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

bad_user 8y ago
Actually it's available in Romania too, I noticed that today, that list is outdated.

chillydawg 8y ago

Can I pay more to stop Google advertising to me and collecting my data? They can keep their HDD space.

jstanley 8y ago
Yes, you can buy your own hard disks and not use Google.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  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.
  - kmlx 8y ago
    GSuite?
    - piyush_soni 8y ago
      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?
  - jstanley 8y ago
    That's basically what nextcloud is trying to be, although I don't think it's there yet.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
You don't have to pay for that. You can just turn it off.

spyckie2 8y ago

"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.

mtgx 8y ago
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.
iKevinShah 8y ago
Most probably they'll follow the path like other products have followed: Google Keep -> Keep -> Keep Notes -> Notes (In near future)
- powercf 8y ago
  Google One ⇒ One ⇒ One Two ⇒ Two?
  - welly 8y ago
    They must be using a roadie for their product naming.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    More like: Google One => One => Google => product canceled

Animats 8y ago

Looking forward to "Google Plus One".

Insanity 8y ago

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? :)

mkj 8y ago
Arq Backup works well as long as you remember your passphrase.
ztjio 8y ago
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.
vwelling 8y ago
Quite happy with Backblaze for exactly this reason, as it allows you to set your own private encryption key. That they're quite reasonably priced doesn't hurt either :)
Gnurou 8y ago
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.
kmlx 8y ago
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.
- pjc50 8y ago

iamben 8y ago

I pay 2 quid a month for extra Gmail storage (20gb) and nothing else... Does this get rolled into that?!

Jaruzel 8y ago

I've just tried to share this link to a friend over WhatsApp. WhatsApp will NOT show a link preview for it, like it does for all other URLs. Is WhatsApp blocking link previews for Google services?

callalex 8y ago
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...
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  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).
jeklj 8y ago
Come on

unixhero 8y ago

Okay. Another product they will sunset after 5 3-8 years.

lmedinas 8y ago

For that price i would not mind to get a subscription if it would be fully encrypted and a good messaging app unlike the hangouts and allo trash.

malux85 8y ago

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. No thanks.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
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.
- wstrange 8y ago
  My biggest fear is accidentally losing or deleting all my family photos. I don't trust myself to run proper backups and archival. I think the average consumer is in the same boat. They want someone else to take care of this problem.
nwellnhof 8y ago
They could win privacy-conscious users back by offering an ad and tracking free Google experience with the paid plans.
- Jnr 8y ago
  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.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  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

xnb11 8y ago

This page looks like http://hooli.com/ http://hooli.com/ . Google does seem to have a sense of humor. It is amazing how Google screws up any UI or explanatory pages apart from search. I guess common sense isn't taught in CLRS.

kkrbalam 8y ago
lol!!!

onyva 8y ago

Does anybody really trust google with any of their services? It’s here today gone tomorrow.

zengineer 8y ago
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.
danso 8y ago
Doesn’t seem to be the case with either GMail or Drive.
dwild 8y ago
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. They added the client support, that's all.

Proven 8y ago

Thanks but I have a ton of cap at home, as well as a convenient and secure way to access it remotely

zwaps 8y ago

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...

dwild 8y ago
Encrypt your data yourself and don't trust any cloud provider to do it for you. You can only trust yourself.
- bassman9000 8y ago
  That's the complain: they could do it, and be liable for it, if they wanted, and still be profitable.

sensecall 8y ago

I have almost no idea what the offering is here... can someone explain?

audiolion 8y ago

Google One, and Google Drive.. why not just merge the products and call it OneDrive?

projectramo 8y ago

Easy with the criticism folks. This is just the first version. All the confusion will disappear with Google One 2.0

tfeldmann 8y ago
I'll wait for Google One 2.3
- tremblane 8y ago
  Is that the release where it's specialized for certain groups? Like, "Google One 2.3 for businesses"
  - snaky 8y ago
    Well, it's still better than "Google One 2.3 Tab S3 Plus 10.1 (EU ver), with stylus"
rdsubhas 8y ago
You mean Google Two. Or maybe one Google One will be deprecated in favor of two Google Twos.
- twblalock 8y ago
  All three will come preinstalled with Android phones at the same time.
jrnichols 8y ago
I figured that it would be Google One (beta) for 7 years first.
ashelmire 8y ago
I'll wait for Google One Lollipop.
Svoka 8y ago
I'll wait for Google One 4.3 API 34 Nobby Nobbs 17.3.1 Libraries 12.22

seanhunter 8y ago

The prize will go to the first person to build a full von Neumann machine using Google One and Coke Zero.

darkstar_16 8y ago

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?

kylehotchkiss 8y ago

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.

timdavila 8y ago
If they're not very clearly stating the opposite, the answer should be assumed to be yes they are monetizing it.

manigandham 8y ago

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.

abalos 8y ago

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.

laputan_machine 8y ago
Less bureaucracy, more bike-shedding, but yes, I agree (from experience!).

buboard 8y ago

Also consider Google Eye as a good candidate name,

jeklj 8y ago

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

ashelmire 8y ago

Scrolled down the home page and have no idea what the product is. Is this a rebrand of google drive?

futurix 8y ago

"One" - sure sign of a branding failure.

imgabe 8y ago

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.

tacomonstrous 8y ago
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.
elagost 8y ago
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/ https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-linux-ext4-only/ NextCloud and a $5/mo VPS work great for me.

ryandvm 8y ago

> You're currently signed in to your G Suite account. Switch to your personal Google Account to upgrade. Ugh... Google never misses an opportunity to shit on its most ardent supporters - the people with personal G-Suite domains.

NiekvdMaas 8y ago
Very true, this is the case among many of their products. For example Google Home is not fully working on G Suite accounts, ridiculous.
- roganartu 8y ago
  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.
Sargos 8y ago
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.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  The pedantry doesn't help the customer. Your correction reminds me of the bureaucracy in the movie Brazil. Reasons may be justified internally but a shitty experience for customers is still a shitty experience.
buro9 8y ago
I have just completed a migration... here's my guide and the background: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d2929066951 https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906... 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.

IgorPartola 8y ago

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.

mtgx 8y ago
How else would the people proposing and working on these things internally get promotions?
marcodave 8y ago
I've learned here in HN, that's how you get promoted in Google

dbg31415 8y ago

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.

_JasonE 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

falcor84 8y ago

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.

gedy 8y ago
I'm confident that's company politics and bonuses for launching the "new" at play here.

whalesalad 8y ago

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.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

Can someone explain to me why google really wants me to move my photos out of Drive and into Google Photos? What’s in it for them?

catacombs 8y ago
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.
misterdoubt 8y ago
Google Photos is a key source of data for their work on image processing, classification, etc...

atomisonline 8y ago

Nice, I can't wait to put everything on my One Drive....wait a minute...

jimijazz 8y ago

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.

eximius 8y ago

Hm, does this solve the 'consumer-level support' (or lack thereof) problem? I can't tell if the experts are essentially human tutorials or if they can actually escalate issues.

sansopticon 8y ago

One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

shashankjain16 8y ago

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.

dwild 8y ago
> 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.
- shashankjain16 8y ago
  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.

roland35 8y ago

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!

OafTobark 8y ago
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.

acdha 8y ago

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.

jeremy7600 8y ago
Advertising service.

TootsMagoon 8y ago

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.

mda 8y ago
I hear this often but usually lacks explanation, can you elaborate?
- blairbeckwith 8y ago
  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.

sidcool 8y ago

If I opt for Google One, does Google stop using my Drive contents for ad targeting?

malchow 8y ago

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!

tln 8y ago
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.

ChrisArchitect 8y ago

what the hell -- this is like 7 months ago news/rolled out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306

iamgopal 8y ago

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.

iamgopal 8y ago

Just tell me it's encrypted and even we can not see your data.

hateful 8y ago

(GoogleDrive) + (OneDrive) = (Google*One)

digitalsanctum 8y ago

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?

arbitrage 8y ago

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. Thanks, but you need to grow up a bit, Google.

dmix 8y ago
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.
- nathas 8y ago
  > This isn't some side project like Wave that they'll cut off. Wave was launched to a ton of fan-fare and seemed like a first-order product, similar to Hangouts... which is now also dying a slow death.
- microdrum 8y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure that they won't cut it off. For example, they have already removed the marketing page that people here are making fun of: https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3
  - dmix 8y ago
    Ha, amazing. Not only are they bad at it, they are thin-skinned too.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  I've had pretty good luck with apps like songshift to migrate between services. It's never %100, but pretty decent.

dmix 8y ago

Is there any new software released with this for syncing/uploading all of your files to Google One? Edit: looks like they only have a web app for desktop and only have an app for Android, no iPhone support yet: https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app Without syncing like MEGASync or Dropbox (even if it's only one way uploading) this is pretty useless as a central repository.

tambourine_man 8y ago

Flickery mobile page. Tap menu bar to scroll up doesn’t work.

eftpotrm 8y ago

"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.

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freehunter 8y ago
>for most uses >100GB in one week 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".
- eftpotrm 8y ago
  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'.

pleasecalllater 8y ago

What's the removal date for this service?

OafTobark 8y ago

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.

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horatiocain 8y ago

It'll be shut down in two years...

microdrum 8y ago

What a joke. Now they have pulled the marketing page -- possibly because of how hard we are laughing at them. https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3 Every new storage product offered by Google serves mostly to remind people to get their stuff off of Google.

timdellinger 8y ago

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".

mugwort13 8y ago

I have no idea where they got the idea for this. None. https://www.zoho.com/one/ https://www.zoho.com/one/

illusiveworm 8y ago

It baffles me that people willingly give their data to Google. Not only that, but some pay for it too.

kgwxd 8y ago

Google OneDrive

fredsanford 8y ago

Maybe it has something to do with one being the rough average number of testicles in the human population?

moretosee 8y ago

it may shutdown down the road. you never know

jeisc 8y ago

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?

karmakaze 8y ago

> One The number of baskets to put all your eggs into.

Svoka 8y ago

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.