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The Google Drive App For PC, Mac Is Being Shut Down In March (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-the-line dept.

Google announced in a blog post today that the Google Drive app for desktop will be shut down. The Verge reports: Support will be cut off on December 11th and the app will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018. Users who are still running the Drive app will start seeing notifications in October that it's "going away," and the company will steer customers towards one of two replacements depending on whether they're a consumer or business user. Google Drive the service isn't going anywhere. You can still access it from the web, smartphone apps, and either of the software options mentioned below. Google now has two fairly new software tools for backing up your data and/or accessing files in the cloud. There's Backup and Sync, the all-encompassing consumer app that replaces both the standalone Google Drive and Google Photos Uploader apps. It offers essentially the same functionality as Drive and works much the same way. And on the enterprise side, Google has rolled out Drive File Streamer, which saves space on your local drive while providing access to "all of your Google Drive files on demand, directly from your computer."

2 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Good engineers, terrible marketing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have never seen a company so successful at building amazing products with so many smart people working there manage to completely destroy its traction in markets. Messaging, social networking - its like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Complete failures of leadership.

    I work at Amazon. Our engineering teams are good, but clearly not quite at the level of Google. But we ship products that do what customers want and we make money in markets. We don't play silly fricking games with "beta" for two years then scrapping products millions of people use.

    Then again, we aren't an advertising company where you aren't the customer, you are the product. Ultimately that attitude will be Google's downfall.

  2. Mac is PC; Xbox isn't by tepples · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Same way the "GNU/Linux" stuff was always dead in the water too.

    What's a better term to distinguish GNU/Linux, which uses Linux as its kernel, from Android, which also uses Linux as its kernel?

    PC is an architecture and even "Macs" are really just "PCs" now (as is XBox and so on).

    Macs are personal computers because the person who owns it directs what computing is done on it. This has been the case as long as Xcode has been available. An unmodded retail Xbox, by contrast, is not a personal computer because Microsoft uses code signing to control what code is allowed to run. The same is true of a Windows RT or Windows 10 S device.