Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Why I'm dropping Google Drive for Dropbox

I've migrated the whole company over to Google Drive and have been using it for 12 months. Everything seemed OK at first and we started using Docs and Sheets in place of Office.

Here are some of the issues that have cropped up that are now insurmountable:

Google Drive is slow

Not just slow, but sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.... this could be to do with being based in Australia, I don't know, but I do know that it can take hours for large file to upload. And forget about Photoshop or Illustrator files, they can take days

Google Drive is Unreliable - especially on a Mac

GDrive crashes. Often. And doesn't tell you. We run a mixed environment of Windows and Mac - on Windows it seems to be pretty good, but on a Mac not so. GDrive also has a weird habit of incorrectly showing folders as not shared but they are - internally this is just annoying, but externally it could be damaging. 

Maximum 2Mb images in Docs and Sheets

We design products, these need lots of images and they are regularly more than 2Mb in size. Limiting the size of the images that we can import into Docs and Sheets (and Slides) is an insurmountable issue for the Product Design team. 

Docs and Sheets are Primitive

I've tried, I really have... but Docs and Sheets are just not nice to use - Sheets misses some core functions that I know and love (e.g. Goal Seek). Formatting is just plain and trying to get something looking nice is tedious and difficult. Table of contents can't have page numbers. 

Internet Connectivity is Required

Perhaps not such an issue when (if) the NBN rolls out in our area, but at the moment, having eight people on a network and using Docs and especially Sheets can be a problem - Sheets and Docs themselves aren't, but if someone's uploading a huge Photoshop file it can cause reload issues with Docs and Sheets. In addition, using Sheets for large spreadsheets is slow - it can take up to 30 seconds to load each worksheet, which whilst that's not a lot in the grand scheme of things is just plain annoying. 


Still there are things that I'll miss - sharing, instant comments, full integration with my Android phone. It's a big job to change again and I'm not looking forward to it, but Google Drive, Docs and Sheets are not business ready yet. Maybe one day, but not now.