How Google Killed GDrive and Spiked Its Skype Acquisition

<i>“Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”<p>Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”<p>“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”</i><p>Color me stunned too. I just took a vacation to Italy and my camera sure has heck didn't push 40GB of photos up into the cloud on some random wifi connection that didn't exist where I was at that very moment, so that I could then saturate the nonexistent bandwidth pulling them all back down again for viewing and editing (or panorama stitching).<p>This is actually the #1 use case for me that prevents me from traveling a few pounds lighter with just a tablet. I need lots of storage for photos.<p>I'm half playing with the idea of just getting a big dropbox account for traveling and just push all my photos up at the end of the day. A 50-60GB GDrive would have been great had Google offered it.

I think the GDrive cancellation in particular highlights a real problem at Google: the tendency to have a much clearer idea of what they want users to be doing than of what users want to do.<p>Generic cloud storage could be a great bridge between the way the vast majority of people are used to working with data (as files) and the plethora of online services that can make that data useful in (to the user) unforeseen ways. But because the Google future is so dazzling, it's not enough to step into it. One must leap.

This is essentially just 2 small excerpts from the actual book, and a short video interview.<p>Here are two other excepts (from a previous HN article) of the book that also link to a free preview of the first chapter.<p><a href="https://kindle.amazon.com/post/1EJFN69GTE3AN" rel="nofollow">https://kindle.amazon.com/post/1EJFN69GTE3AN</a><p><a href="https://kindle.amazon.com/post/2BJ69NQFHGN1P" rel="nofollow">https://kindle.amazon.com/post/2BJ69NQFHGN1P</a><p>I'd recommend reading the preview even if you don't plan on buying the book right now. But getting this book in multiple small excerpts doesn't really do it justice.

Given how well DropBox and Skype are doing this doesn't say very much about Google management. I'm surprised Pichai and Chan still have their jobs.

In this argument, i'm with pichai and chan. They just did the thing that google is known for. Google is best when it create a web-app or any enterprise from its store. When they acquire something they are most likely take the different approach then the original thinking of that company. This in most cases fails to scale and integrate that app.

Pity. I think Google might have done better with Skype.

The crazy idea that files are obsolete reminds me of how Skype thought that the old multiwindow communicator paradigm needed replacing and forced Skype 5 on disgruntled users.<p>Skype insists they see the future while users keep downgrading to 2.8

These size limitations are pretty 1990 <a href="http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603" rel="nofollow">http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603</a>

I'm 2/3rd of the way through the book right now, and I vacillate between being ready to ditch the book altogether (for cheerleading Google too much) and continuing on in horrid fascination (Mayer announcing basically that design was dead "machines made this")<p>Too much to review here, but overall I am immensely impressed with the talent at Google and their potential to change the world. It's truly an incredible thing to watch.<p>I also feel like if you took a bunch of hopelessly naive engineering grads, gave them 100 Billion dollars, and turned them loose on the world, you'd have a Google. That both a compliment and a critique. I strongly suspect that Googlers aren't all wearing superman capes and flying around the planet, looking for evil villains. Much of it today must be tediously boring.<p>But "files are so 1990"?<p>We are not going to reinvent the mainframe as the internet. At least I sincerely hope not. No matter how many super-incredible geniuses we throw at it, there are really good reasons that have nothing to do with 1990 that lead me to know that I want complete control over my data and my processing. That doesn't mean that those things have to permanently live locally, but it sure as hell doesn't mean that I have to "control" them through some cloud provider using html. Maybe I'm smoking crack, but it seems to me we're just proving that old saying "you can have too much of a good thing"<p>Hopefully one day it'll be 2025 and these same types of forward-thinking people (I consider myself one) will have moved beyond rigid cloud/client thinking and be saying "the cloud is so 2010, you know?"