5 reasons why the GDrive is not the end of PCs

Google’s gonna render PCs useless? Fat chance. This is pure hype, probably to bolster a flagging stock price (now’s the time to buy, btw) and you should not get sucked into it for even a moment.

Trust Sergey and Larry implicitly? Thinking of giving the kool-aid a little taste? Here’s why the standalone machine isn’t going anywhere and/or why a Google-driven PC isn’t anywhere in your future:

1. You’ll still need a computer to access this information. The majority of people’s work that will require significant storage isn’t going to be done from a million different machines. It’s done from two at most: One at home, one at work, and even then the majority of the world doesn’t mix the two. Sure, Google’s going to offer a desktop model that could be cheaper minus hard drive space, but…
2. Programs: Many of us have a hard time keeping a YouTube video running at normal speed without caching for five minutes. You really think Photoshop is going to be effectively streamed and used over an internet connection – that is if it’s compatible with Bride-of-Android to being with? And don’t give me that cloud computing crap, it doens’t mater how fast those hard drives are all working in the background. Control of applications and calling up documents will be about your bandwidth, and bandwidth is getting awfully tight. You’re still going to have to run your (non-Google) programs on a hardwired machine, said machine will still have to be beefy enough to run them and that portion isn’t going to be portable.Microsoft might be able to pull it off, having office and other common programs pre-loaded on ths machine. Adobe might be able to pull it off. Google’s versions of what everyone uses every day aren’t up to scratch with the real thing, and that is why Google will not pull it off.
3. The concept already exists: When you get down to it, what is the GDrive? Actually, I’ll give you this – we don’t know everything for certain. But if the idea is that it’s a place to upload your files and access them anywhere…um, isn’t that just an online backup, which already exists? And the finer print in discussions reveal that they might come with as much as 50 gig of space?  My illegal music downloads history papers take up at least that much space, let alone the software I use to run my life. Hell, Google has this already, it’s called ‘clever use of your gmail account’ and it lets me keep using my superior non-Google products. Unless it’s also shareable storage amongst your trusted friends in which case…
4. The RIAA ruins everything online: If your files are shareable, how long is it going to be before everyone’s favorite legal group decides to protect its artists’ copyrights when it finds a way to prove that stolen music is sitting on Google’s hard drive? Peter Brown in this particular article fears that Google “can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government”. Dude. So can the ten year-old HP you’re reading this on. There are enough security headaches to keep the masses away from this one for good.
5. Google breaks everything it touches: Google doesn’t have a great track record with getting technology right very quickly - it comes out buggy, not very intuitive and slow to improve. With a certain weak-ass platform gaining ground against the world’s standard because it’s less buggy and easy to use because it’s powerless, people aren’t looking for more complicated. They want simpler. And the idea of using a busted-out-of-the-box open source (read:insecure) platform fresh out of beta that isn’t compatible with anything you use on a day-to-day basis (and specifically isn’t built to be friendly to MS Office) and utilizes unproven storage techniques because, I don’t know why, because it can…isn’t going to move a lot of product in this day and age.

Free online storage attached to one’s gmail login? Cool.

Groundbreaking? Hardly.

Gonna change the world? Only if you’re still excited by digital watches.

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

Tags:   fail · Google · Google sucks Share on Twitter

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