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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive will fail because Google actually thinks everybody loves and trusts them. People are getting smarter, and they're starting to understand that the type of centralized cloud computing that Google is forcefully pushing on its users is the exact kind of distasteful scenario that Orwell warned us of.

People really do not want their entire digital experience curated, controlled, and highly manipulated by a centralized, autonomous entity, with zero-human interaction, and zero-support if something goes wrong.

The Google's free ice cream business model isn't going work forever. Eventually decentralized, private cloud computing is going to come along and make their entire business model obsolete.

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Is this a comment on the proposed Drive or Google as a whole?

If this is about the Drive feature itself then how is Dropbox different? They have the data of all their users. In fact they know for a fact that its valuable data since the user chose to pay to back it up.

The OP's link was a speculation just like Drive speculation itself.

Google might have problems as a company but that's not as relevant to the success or failure of a Drive feature in my opinion. It all depends on the experience and cost.

My comment explains why I think Drive will fail, because of the business model of the company that is behind it. Google's advertising model necessitates evil things to be done with the content their users upload. And my prediction is users are going to start spitting up the free ice cream Google is serving.

Given your stated beliefs, wouldn't you also expect Gmail, the Google search engine, etc to be failing too? That doesn't seem to be the case.

...yet. I fully expect Gmail and Search to decline in popularity, and with it Google's profitability and viability. Users are starting to revolt, and switch to alternatives like DDG. I don't know of any good Gmail alternatives yet, but the timing is really right for some startup to come along with a better email solution.

Google may appear an unstoppable juggernaut, but they most certainly are not. I think their business is very seriously threatened because of the type of business model they've chosen.

"People really do not want..."

People or you? To me it seems that "people", as in the majority of users for such a product, don't really know or care.

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