"Google One" suffers from designer in a box syndrome.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But right now, the copy and landing page are way off the messaging mark.
Consolidation of the services is nice, but I feel like this is just getting creepier and creepier.<p>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!<p>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.<p>No thanks.
Their support site is far more valuable than the landing page.<p>From the main support index at <a href="https://support.google.com/googleone/" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/googleone/</a> here are various tidbits of useful content that the surrounding HN comments wished for (sorry, none describe the "expert help" available):<p>"Get Google One":<p><a href="https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013</a><p>> 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.<p>"How your existing storage works with Google One":<p><a href="https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014</a><p>> 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.<p>"Claim a Benefit":<p><a href="https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266</a><p>> Google One hotel deals depend on the day, time, and other factors. There might not be a deal for every hotel search.<p><a href="https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668</a><p>"Learn where Google One is available":<p>> Create or join a family; Use Google Play Family Library; Subscribe to the Google Play Music family plan; Use a family calendar
Hey Google ... I know you're here, looking for how this is going to go over.<p>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.<p>Thanks, but you need to grow up a bit, Google.
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.<p>Aren't things usually <i>cheaper</i> when you buy bulk?
For a moment I thought it was going to be another chat app.<p>Instead it's... something? A one sentence description at the beginning of the page wouldn't hurt...
> You're currently signed in to your G Suite account. Switch to your personal Google Account to upgrade.<p>Ugh... Google never misses an opportunity to shit on its most ardent supporters - the people with personal G-Suite domains.
Google One = Google Drive + more space + Customer Service for around $2 a month.<p>Customer Service is not called Customer Service but Google Experts. What does this mean for actual service?<p>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.<p>"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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Why would anyone actually do that? That's just a disaster waiting to happen...
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.<p>Expert access for $1.99/mo? Huh?
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.
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.<p>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.
This page looks like <a href="http://hooli.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hooli.com/</a> . Google does seem to have a sense of humor.<p>It is amazing how Google screws up any UI or explanatory pages apart from search. I guess common sense isn't taught in CLRS.
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:<p>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.<p>2. This is a good first step to unify Google's paid B2C services that it may want to offer, especially since G+ is being discontinued.
Kind of related, I was recentl thinking about making some backups of valuable (emotionally speaking) things like wedding pictures.<p>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.<p>Does anyone have good alternatives that perhaps respect privacy? :)
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!"<p>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!
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.<p>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.
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?
what the hell -- this is like 7 months ago news/rolled out<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067168</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079306</a>
Google One sounds like a device to me. I think it would be clearer to take the existing "Google Family" service they already offer (of which Google One is feature) and add "Shared expanded storage on Drive, Gmail, and more" as an optional feature.
Is Google just a prepetual exercise in branding? They create a slightly different product, get it to popularity, kill it, announce a new brand to replace it, rinse, repeat.
Language wise this sounds like the Trojan horse that eventually becomes their amazon prime as far as being a “one stop” membership. It’s disguised as storage right now but seeing the bit about hotel deals... also prime ~ one... hmm.<p>Why this wouldn’t also bundle things like YouTube red or google music proves my hypothesis wrong though.<p>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.
Remember that billboard puzzle google put up in 2004?<p>I think this might be the same thing.<p>If you can figure out what Google One is you are a genius!
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.
I'm confused. What is it? A storage bump? Paid support? A discount plan? A consolidation of all these offerings from different places into <i>one</i> home?<p>This is such a bad landing page. I have more questions than answers.
Google One is finally available in my country, although I was hoping for YouTube Premium, which isn't available yet.<p>Things to note:<p>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<p>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<p>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 :-)<p>So I'm wondering, for power users that would want this, why bother with Google One at all?
Wait for Google one Allo with desktop client, which will be neither compatible with old Google one and also only support large files, but it automatically recognise your neighborhood and suggest you to buy from nearby store.
I couldn't find anything about availability (24/7?), response times, or issue escalation for their 'experts.' If I got locked out of my account, would I still have access to an expert to help?
My only guess is that large companies suffer from too much bureaucracy when it comes to naming. As a result, you'll never get a phenomenal name, but you also won't get a really bad name either. Odds are you'll get something within a couple standard deviations of "normal" and end up with a name that's just kind of... boring.
My experience with Google's Backup and Sync means I would never trust Google again.<p>I put everything on Google's Backup and Sync... and was initially happy enough with it as a replacement for Dropbox.<p>Then my laptop crashed.<p>When I went to restore, I was limited to copying files down 2 GB at a time.<p>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.<p>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.
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:<p>A logo<p>A headline<p>Two short sentences<p>A sign up box<p>A note saying that paying customers will eventually automatically be upgraded.<p>That's it.<p>No pictures. No movies. No backgrounds. No parallax. No nothing.<p>Did they completely change the landing page since this was posted 20 minutes ago?
Interesting that it is available in only some EU member countries, but not all of them. Oddly, not Ireland.<p>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
"Space for everything! Your life, uncompressed! Top standard tier, 200GB!"<p>OK, I'm a photographer. But I literally outgrew a 300GB drive about 10 years ago, and genuinely shot nearly 100GB in <i>one week</i> 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.)<p>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.
Is there any new software released with this for syncing/uploading all of your files to Google One?<p>Edit: looks like they only have a web app for desktop and only have an app for Android, no iPhone support yet: <a href="https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app" rel="nofollow">https://one.google.com/faq/google-one-app</a><p>Without syncing like MEGASync or Dropbox (even if it's only one way uploading) this is pretty useless as a central repository.
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.<p>I do agree with people's reservations about privacy and longevity with Google, their products don't seem to last for long!
How does sharing of space work?<p>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?
Just a reminder. You are the product Google sells. This is a premium service to make you a more premium product that Google will sell to advertisers. We should all be looking at different (non advertising) models for the services they are offering. Hyper-targeted advertising and all the risks associated with it is not good for society.
I really wish Google would have clearly said whether they will or will not monetize data inside Google One accounts. With my paid G Suite account for personal use I have some confidence Google isn't monetizing my Gmail, Drive, and hopefully Photos, but with Google One, I can't see the same policy written clearly.
My personal approach to storage is to prescind as much from it as I can. I'm constantly deleting old photos and media that I create, as I believe that I will have less and less time to even see them again in the future, so I'm trying to live as light as possible and keep only the 'prime' material.
Name is terrible. So, Google One is only about storage. Google Music is different subscription. I would laugh if google would make some Play Store subscription and call it Google Everything. Then you'll have to get Google One and Everything.
What a joke. Now they have pulled the marketing page -- possibly because of how hard we are laughing at them.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3</a><p>Every new storage product offered by Google serves mostly to remind people to get their stuff off of Google.
And yet again they don't care about gsuite users. I have a gsuite setup for everyone in the family, for pretty much exactly the same needs that are addressed by Google One, but apparently there's absolutely no way to get the benefits of both.
Will the current or future google censor be applied to your access of your data?<p>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?
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?<p>The actual amount of space is so trivial compared to my many terabytes of storage so that is not a useful feature for me.
It may be a good deal for the space but do not buy this for better support because it is absolutely nonexistent. It takes about 48 hours to get the first email reply and is the same team and capability as the free consumer services.
Some of the scariest words that occur when a radical new product is launched are telling current customers of existing products "you'll be automatically upgraded".
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.<p>Is WhatsApp blocking link previews for Google services?
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?
Hm, does this solve the 'consumer-level support' (or lack thereof) problem?<p>I can't tell if the experts are essentially human tutorials or if they can actually escalate issues.
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?"
It seems like Google always gets in it's own way and this is no exception. They need to stop with this nonsense and bring back apps that are actually useful like Google Reader and improving apps that folks use everyday like Gmail and Google Maps. When is the last time one of these apps had a memorable and compelling new feature?
A lot of people here have commented about their mistrust in Google and won't use this service. I thought I'd add my two cents base on actual experience with using Google One.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>During this whole ordeal, I had already stopped the client, uninstalled it, and removed any files I had uploaded.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I ended up going with a different cloud storage. World of difference. Never going to trust Google for anything like this ever again.
It’s nice that you can store photos and it’s nice that you can maybe actually finally get support from them, but I don’t understand why those two things are bundled together. Their product offerings are typically sort of baffling