Despite being late entering the cloud storage business, Google says it’s not too late to grab a piece of the market pie: Google Drive – or G Drive – will be launched soon, most probably in the upcoming weeks or months, as reported by the WSJ. What is Google Drive and why it might offer you something different from the other cloud storage vendors?
Google Drive – an overview
Google Drive is a cloud storage service for both businesses and personal user, allowing them to store their files – music, documents, and photos – in the cloud, make them available to be accessed and shared from virtually any web-enabled devices.
Google Drive cloud storage service will be free for “basic” plan subscriber and charge a fee for individual and organizations looking for bigger storage capacity. Regarding pricing, according to a source, Google Drive will be offered at a lower price compared to Dropbox’ $10/50GB/month and $20/100GB/month plans.
With this service, Google will compete directly with Box, Dropbox, iCloud and the rest.
Now here’s an interesting fact about Google Drive: It is actually not a brand new project; Google’s Larry Page has actually developed a service privately, known as G Drive, which allows people store files online. The project was set to launch in 2007, but it never did for one reason or another. Perhaps a coincidence, also on the same year, a startup online storage company called Dropbox has been founded, exploring a virtually no-man’s land, and succeed – Dropbox now has over 45 million members and valued at $4 billion.
Google did not see that coming, I suppose… and as Google saw new player in the business succeeding, they feel the itch to jump into the cloud storage bandwagon.
Verdict
What Google Drive offers is actually nothing new, with a sense of been-there-done-that. However, with its established cloud infrastructure that also hosts the popular Google Apps, YouTube and Google+, Google can offer a one-stop, integrated cloud solution to users.
With competitive pricing, full-fledged integrated services and the reliable cloud infrastructure (and a host of Google fans who are more than willing to try out everything Google), there is no reason that Google Drive won’t rake in success like its competitors.
What do you think – will G Drive succeed?
