Google vs Microsoft?

[bANONYMOUS]

This is going to be a long post, but I feel like it's better to have enough info than a vague description..

 

So.. Has anyone else noticed how slow Google Hangouts and Google Drive has been getting in comparison to Skype and Microsoft OneDrive?

 

I only use Hangouts and Android Messages to communicate with people, and when sending videos, I have to use Hangouts (because RCS was too good to be true apparently), but it's so insanely slow, and for whatever reason the promises of RCS having video support is a lie, at least for me anyway as I have sent a video with Android Messages and it being received nearly unwatchable from the compression that Google claimed was never going to happen with RCS, so, turns out RCS is not working and Bell customers in Canada are still using the older MMS despite Google saying RCS is live and working as long as you use the Google Android Messages app which I have been for years.

So Hangouts is kind of my only option for sending video clips of projects I'm working on to clients for their approval without encoding the video, uploading to Google Drive, and sending them a link. Which will bring us into our second issue.. But just for a reference on Hangouts send time, I can send a 10-30 video clip, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes to send, I've tried on multiple different devices, different versions of Android, I even tried iOS, and always end up with the same result, tried on Data or Wifi, it's always painfully slow.

 

Are there any tweaks for this or is this just a glitch that's been on going for about a year now? Has Google just given up on Hangouts entirely and it's slowly (pun intended) falling down the rabbit hole?

 

Second issue is Google Drive, I edit videos both on the go and at home using Google Drive. I'll do a shoot out of town, upload everything to my laptop that I have with me, start editing it at the hotel or on a plane, and everything saves to Google Drive using the desktop sync client, so when I get back home, all of the footage has already synced locally on my desktop, the updated project file with all of the work I did on the laptop is uploaded, I just have to open the project file on the desktop, and it's exactly where I left off from my laptop, it's seamless, and I can start adding visual effects that would normally be too stressful for the laptop to maintain, then encode the video with the higher performance of the desktop computer. (occasionally I'll remote into the desktop to do this step if I can't make it back to town in time to get the video finished and it's been working for a long time)

 

However, recently I've noticed it's been getting slower and slower and occasionally just crashes, to the point that I nearly filled my 128gb SD card, there's roughly 100gb of footage, I started the upload last night, I'm now at my desktop, and it's still not done uploading from the local files on the laptop to Google Drive, which means nothing has been synced to the local directly on my desktop. This isn't the first time this has happened either. Randomly it will just crawl as slow as can be, and other times it works fine, but over the last few months it's just become slower and slower to the point I don't even try anymore with huge files and I just defaulted back to external SSD's to transfer files from my laptop to the desktop when I'm back in town. Yes it takes longer as I need to backup the footage from the laptop to the SSD, and then from the SSD to the desktop. But it's still faster than Google Drive has been by a long shot.

 

Just out of curiosity I tried sending preview clips using Skype to a client as they used Skype instead of Hangouts, and it works almost instantly, so I tried decided to try OneDrive since Microsoft seems to have Skype figured out, I was sick of waiting for the laptop to finish uploading to Google Drive, so I tried OneDrive just to see if it's a connection issue with my devices/internet speed or if it's Google Drive, and all of the files uploaded in less than an hour, I started syncing to Google Drive at about midnight yesterday, it has synced 53% so far in the course of almost 21 hours..

 

So, recap..

Google Drive 53% of 100GB upload in 21 hours

Microsoft One Drive 100% of 100GB uploaded in <1 hour

 

Why is Google so slow? And why is Microsoft so unbelievable fast by comparison for basically the identical price for cloud storage? Are there alternatives for an all in one solution? (one account for messaging and cloud storage) I kind of hate the new OneDrive layout, it was better when it used to just be a folder I can allocate to a drive, now it's a standalone program and that doesn't really jive with my workflow that well, I can work around it and figure something out but I would prefer to keep Google Drive going as I already have everything set up.

 

So, Tweaks? Mods? Different programs using Google Drive to sync across two devices? Alternatives to Hangouts or Skype? Better Hangouts mods or tweaks to improve send time for videos? Anyone in Canada have any luck with RCS sending video that's not compressed to an unrecognizable level?

 

Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

[Airdragonz]

Might be your location relative to the servers of the two companies. If the Google server is farther away and more congested than Microsoft's, your upload speeds will be slower for Drive.