5 ms·

Google keeps shooting itself in the foot with google drive, it's insane. When Google Docs came out, everyone thought Microsoft was screwed. They had such a hea

by d--b 4y ago

Google keeps shooting itself in the foot with google drive, it's insane. When Google Docs came out, everyone thought Microsoft was screwed. They had such a headstart in cloud-based collaboration. But somehow, they managed to eff up google drive and anything offline for so long that Dropbox is still the best option for cloud storage and Microsoft had the time to rebuild its whole Office suite in javascript.

titzer 4y ago
My biggest gripe is that the web UI for Google drive seems exclusively designed for tablet users. Enormous icons with previews, little text, no real hierarchical organization, assumption of search-based navigation of docs, it's just so difficult to organize and use. It's like every thing anyone ever knew about organizing and finding files was just thrown out the window. As someone who has used computers for nearly 30 years at this point, I find it infuriating how hard it tries to make my skills useless.
- krashidov 4y ago
  I couldn’t have said it better. Why are the icons so large and useless at the same time. So much padding and such low information density
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I wish LibreOffice folks would drop whatever they are trying to do with their 'online suite' and just create a self-hosted web version of LibreOffice.
- pmontra 4y ago
  They kind of have it at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ "Kind of" because it seems to be unsupported but I see links to binaries and docker images on that page.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    their solution is to run regular LO on server and then transmit the image to the client app ... and it works abysmally bad compared to google docs.
  - davidgerard 4y ago
    The work is being done at Collabora Online. you can download it and play with it: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
- esskay 4y ago
  You can kinda do it with NextCloud and their LibreOffice integration but I wouldn't trust it with anything important given it often breaks during updates.
- Aachen 4y ago
  It's not LibreOffice, but while revisiting CryptPad (which I thought was a multiplayer notepad like etherpad or codimd, except with an encryption key in the url fragment identifier) I was impressed to see that they're expanding to become an entire office suite. You get a WYSIWYG editor (I'd rather wish for markdown but ok), spreadsheet editor, survey forms, and more which I don't remember, all live like google docs but (as I understand it, I didn't audit it) end to end encrypted between the users. It's a bit heavy because everything has to happen on the client side, so it's a lot of JavaScript, but after the page loads it works smoothly. You can self host it as well, there's a list of instances somewhere on https://cryptpad.org https://cryptpad.org with the official instance being https://cryptpad.fr https://cryptpad.fr LibreOffice has a ton more features and is way harder to port. Case in point: I was at an open source conference where LibreOffice proudly demo'd their new server version. At some point they drop that it uses mapnik. Me, confused, asked huh why'd you use an OpenStreetMap rendering library? Turns out they basically run the ancient C++ UI on the server and make a VNC-like connection and that map tiles is the fastest way to load partial screen updates. At least, that's what I remember from that presentation, I haven't looked into that madness further, but that's LibreOffice online...
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    yes, that's exactly what I was referring by thing they should just drop. It works really bad. I did look at Cryptopad a few years ago, and, while promising, it is not close to being ready to replace Google docs/sheets anytime soon.
cubefox 4y ago
I do think that Google Drive is much better than Dropbox for various reasons (browser GUI, storage space), and certainly better than Microsoft's OneDrive or Sharepoint, which e.g. have ridiculously long URLs. But it is indeed remarkable that Google Docs (or whatever their office solution is called) was first ahead of Microsoft in the "browser office" space and then lost its lead. I think the main cause was that Microsoft Office formats (docx and xlsx) never ceased to be dominant, and Google Docs didn't support them until it was too late. My company first used "Google Suite" for a few years in combination with local Microsoft Office. You couldn't get rid of the latter, since other companies "communicated in" Microsoft Office formats. If you can't open and edit them reliably in Google products, you might as well switch to Microsoft completely. Which is exactly what happened for us.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The Trojan horse for OneDrive/Sharepoint is that they're all the SAME in the back end, and you can interact with them via Teams and nobody knows the difference. Now that with Office + Teams + Sharepoint you get multiplayer Powerpoint/Excel/Word, Google Docs is on the backfoot again - the HUGE advantage to Docs was being able to work on them collaboratively, even if they were missing 50-80% of the features expected.
- d--b 4y ago
  I honestly don’t understand how you can find google drive better than dropbox. I wanted to use google drive. It would have given me more space for emails, and I wouldn’t have had to deal with another service. But even syncing files from my computer to the cloud never worked properly. I kept getting conflicts and files that would always fail. Then there is the ”shortcut” debacle where you can’t sync files that are shared with you on your own computer. Dropbox just works.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    Okay, those are apparently different use cases. I was mainly speaking about the browser GUI, which seems great to me for Google Drive. Also the Android app was much better when I last tried it. There are also little features. For example, if a Dropbox folder is shared with you, you can't simply put a short cut to that folder in your own Dropbox folders. You have to "remember" it outside of your Dropbox folder structure, e.g. via a browser bookmark. Perhaps Dropbox is indeed better when it comes to synchronizing folders though, which was its original purpose after all, as the name suggests.

by d--b 4y ago

titzer 4y ago

My biggest gripe is that the web UI for Google drive seems exclusively designed for tablet users. Enormous icons with previews, little text, no real hierarchical organization, assumption of search-based navigation of docs, it's just so difficult to organize and use. It's like every thing anyone ever knew about organizing and finding files was just thrown out the window. As someone who has used computers for nearly 30 years at this point, I find it infuriating how hard it tries to make my skills useless.

krashidov 4y ago
I couldn’t have said it better. Why are the icons so large and useless at the same time. So much padding and such low information density

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

I wish LibreOffice folks would drop whatever they are trying to do with their 'online suite' and just create a self-hosted web version of LibreOffice.

pmontra 4y ago
They kind of have it at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ "Kind of" because it seems to be unsupported but I see links to binaries and docker images on that page.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  their solution is to run regular LO on server and then transmit the image to the client app ... and it works abysmally bad compared to google docs.
- davidgerard 4y ago
  The work is being done at Collabora Online. you can download it and play with it: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
esskay 4y ago
You can kinda do it with NextCloud and their LibreOffice integration but I wouldn't trust it with anything important given it often breaks during updates.
Aachen 4y ago
It's not LibreOffice, but while revisiting CryptPad (which I thought was a multiplayer notepad like etherpad or codimd, except with an encryption key in the url fragment identifier) I was impressed to see that they're expanding to become an entire office suite. You get a WYSIWYG editor (I'd rather wish for markdown but ok), spreadsheet editor, survey forms, and more which I don't remember, all live like google docs but (as I understand it, I didn't audit it) end to end encrypted between the users. It's a bit heavy because everything has to happen on the client side, so it's a lot of JavaScript, but after the page loads it works smoothly. You can self host it as well, there's a list of instances somewhere on https://cryptpad.org https://cryptpad.org with the official instance being https://cryptpad.fr https://cryptpad.fr LibreOffice has a ton more features and is way harder to port. Case in point: I was at an open source conference where LibreOffice proudly demo'd their new server version. At some point they drop that it uses mapnik. Me, confused, asked huh why'd you use an OpenStreetMap rendering library? Turns out they basically run the ancient C++ UI on the server and make a VNC-like connection and that map tiles is the fastest way to load partial screen updates. At least, that's what I remember from that presentation, I haven't looked into that madness further, but that's LibreOffice online...
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  yes, that's exactly what I was referring by thing they should just drop. It works really bad. I did look at Cryptopad a few years ago, and, while promising, it is not close to being ready to replace Google docs/sheets anytime soon.

cubefox 4y ago

I do think that Google Drive is much better than Dropbox for various reasons (browser GUI, storage space), and certainly better than Microsoft's OneDrive or Sharepoint, which e.g. have ridiculously long URLs. But it is indeed remarkable that Google Docs (or whatever their office solution is called) was first ahead of Microsoft in the "browser office" space and then lost its lead. I think the main cause was that Microsoft Office formats (docx and xlsx) never ceased to be dominant, and Google Docs didn't support them until it was too late. My company first used "Google Suite" for a few years in combination with local Microsoft Office. You couldn't get rid of the latter, since other companies "communicated in" Microsoft Office formats. If you can't open and edit them reliably in Google products, you might as well switch to Microsoft completely. Which is exactly what happened for us.

bombcar 4y ago
The Trojan horse for OneDrive/Sharepoint is that they're all the SAME in the back end, and you can interact with them via Teams and nobody knows the difference. Now that with Office + Teams + Sharepoint you get multiplayer Powerpoint/Excel/Word, Google Docs is on the backfoot again - the HUGE advantage to Docs was being able to work on them collaboratively, even if they were missing 50-80% of the features expected.
d--b 4y ago
I honestly don’t understand how you can find google drive better than dropbox. I wanted to use google drive. It would have given me more space for emails, and I wouldn’t have had to deal with another service. But even syncing files from my computer to the cloud never worked properly. I kept getting conflicts and files that would always fail. Then there is the ”shortcut” debacle where you can’t sync files that are shared with you on your own computer. Dropbox just works.
- cubefox 4y ago
  Okay, those are apparently different use cases. I was mainly speaking about the browser GUI, which seems great to me for Google Drive. Also the Android app was much better when I last tried it. There are also little features. For example, if a Dropbox folder is shared with you, you can't simply put a short cut to that folder in your own Dropbox folders. You have to "remember" it outside of your Dropbox folder structure, e.g. via a browser bookmark. Perhaps Dropbox is indeed better when it comes to synchronizing folders though, which was its original purpose after all, as the name suggests.