GDrive is Live!

The rumor around GDrive has been around for last couple of years. There were those who even built software to utilize GMail’s storage space as a drive loadable onto your PC. The combined value of their effort in the online office space and the $100 laptop intiative along with the GDrive was touted as the next big thing.

Finally today Google announced (in a subtle way) their plans for offering additional storage to it’s users. Launched by their Picasa team, it is being positioned as a very simple and easy way to extend storage for your existing Google services. Currently you can extend it to support your GMail (current capacity: 2.8 GB) and Picasa Web Albums (1GB). Naturally they plan to extend it to other services like Docs and Spreadsheets. Users can simply purchase extra storage with straight forward plans listed below.

• 6 GB ($20.00 per year)
• 25 GB ($75.00 per year)
• 100 GB ($250.00 per year)
• 250 GB ($500.00 per year)

The payment process is supported via Google checkout and the model employed is one of “Fill it, shut it and forget it”. So you may ask, how is this different from Box, OmniDrve, XDrive and others. Let’s list out the pros and cons.

Cons

• Pretty expensive
  • Compared to $0.15 per GB per month (around $1.8/GB/year) offered by Amazon
  • Granted they don’t have a user interface, but there are services that do that with little premium.
• No file upload interface
  • Unless you email files to your Gmail account. That would be pretty tacky
  • Almost all drive services offer this feature
• No web/desktop interface or widget of any sort
  • Again this is a standard feature everywhere else

Pros

• Simple and straightforward
• Seamless integration with GMail and Picasa
• Planned integration with other GMail services

All in all this is a very humble beginning for Google and frankly I am somewhat underwhelmed with the offering. Although they are focussed on making things easy for users with seamless service integration versus offering simple raw storage. Some of the features I would love to see are

• APIs APIs APIs
  • Enough said
• Storage access interface
  • Web and desktop
• Storage service for Google Apps program
• Cheaper pricing

Finally knowing Google, we can easily say that this is tip of the iceberg. I am sure they will expand this offering and apply it horizontally across their services. Will keep a close eye on this. Send me your thoughts on this subject.

PS — Microsoft recently announced SkyDrive. Using the cloud metaphor too much eh (or parallels with SkyNet ;-)).