Taking a looking at Google One, Google’s new SaaS
While browsing through job postings earlier this year on Columbia Business School’s job board, a monthly ritual that I’ve (unfortunately) developed as an MBA student, I recently saw that Google was hiring for its Business Operations and Strategy team supporting Google One. After some brief research, it seems like Google’s subscription SaaS offers cloud storage and some other features for regular consumers like you and me. I thought, “interesting, seems like an upgraded Google Drive to compete with products like Dropbox, but are these really sought after?”
While I personally have barely used cloud storage, I do think that this is extremely valuable in an ever-growing digital world. Sometimes I have trouble organizing my files locally and I’ve also actually dealt with losing my entire hard drive before! But there’s already so many types of services like this and on top of that, I’ve always wondered whether the market for these services is growing at a fast and desirable rate and more importantly, whether consumers will actually pay. A quick Google search for Dropbox paid users revealed this:
OK, that makes sense. There definitely is a market for people who aren’t shackled to using USBs old style like me.
So it seems like Google is offering Google One for consumers to store files across its ecosystem: Google Drive, Google Photos, etc. There is a standard tiered subscription model where you get more space for a higher fee. At a first glance, this seems really typical and not novel at all. But if you take a closer look, the $9.99/mo 2TB subscription plan actually gives access to VPN service, something that I had not expected. I had only ever thought of VPN as a tool to access sites from locations that would not allow it. For example, as discussed in my #CBSDigitalLiteracy class this week, one might use a VPN from, let’s say, a European country to access Netflix in the U.S. to watch a movie that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise where they live. The VPN acts as a tunnel to bypass those barriers. But I learned from Google One’s VPN service description that VPNs can be used in other ways as well.
“Your browser and your apps can communicate sensitive information online frequently. Some sites and apps use outdated, weak or no encryption at all.
While in transit, unsecured data can be intercepted or modified by hackers, which compromises your privacy and overall security.
When you enable a VPN, your online data is protected by traveling through a strongly encrypted tunnel. The VPN tunnel is operated by Google through our secure global servers.”
Reading this, I guess this also makes sense. Now we are using the VPN for the utility of security more so than access. In this day and age when we hear about data breaches every other week, this is an additional service that can definitely protect the consumer who is using 2TB worth of data storage. Of course, it is a service that seems specifically targeted for a very small subset of users who would find it useful, but I give Google credit for adding a feature I’ve never seen before. I don’t see this feature on Dropbox’s subscriptions. Maybe Google’s data suggested that its high-tier customers wanted it.
And that brings me back to my original discovery of Google One through job postings. I have always been a fan of working for and with businesses that create consumer-facing products. I thought this could be an interesting job, using SQL and data analytics to drive business strategy and operations forward for a Google service that caters to the consumer. And funnily enough, this past week, I got in contact with a CBS alum at Google who oversees this team and was connected with the Manager of this specific Google One team. The manager mentioned that one of the key things that his team always thinks about is what kinds of additional features they could add to make Google One a stronger product. Apparently his team stands cross-functionally between many teams: Product, Engineering, Marketing, etc. and they are there to act as a form of checks and balance — to validate whether Engineering can move forward creating a certain feature or do the analyses to support a certain thesis.
I think that they’ve started on the right foot. They have an amazing ecosystem of products under the Google brand. They are thinking in the right way to progress Google One. So I’m curious to see whether and how this product will evolve or if it will end up as another project on the Killed by Google list.
What do you think is a feature to be added to Google One?
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