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 $1.8/GB/year) offered by Amazon
- Granted they don’t have a user interface, but there are services that do that with little premium.
- No file upload interface
- Unless you email files to your Gmail account. That would be pretty tacky
- Almost all drive services offer this feature
- No web/desktop interface or widget of any sort
- Again this is a standard feature everywhere else
Pros
- Simple and straightforward
- Seamless integration with GMail and Picasa
- Planned integration with other GMail services
All in all this is a very humble beginning for Google and frankly I am somewhat underwhelmed with the offering. Although they are focussed on making things easy for users with seamless service integration versus offering simple raw storage. Some of the features I would love to see are
- APIs APIs APIs
- Enough said
- Storage access interface
- Web and desktop
- Storage service for Google Apps program
- Cheaper pricing
Finally knowing Google, we can easily say that this is tip of the iceberg. I am sure they will expand this offering and apply it horizontally across their services. Will keep a close eye on this. Send me your thoughts on this subject.
PS — Microsoft recently announced SkyDrive. Using the cloud metaphor too much eh (or parallels with SkyNet ;-)).
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So why should I pay for a service that is still in Beta ? Ask them to first get GMail out of beta and then I can think of paying these A$@#$^s.
Sunil,
That’s a good point.
However I think this is their soft launch for those folks who are running out of space even with 2.8 Gigs (current GMail capacity).
Abhishek
I have been an enthusiastic DriveHQ user for almost 2 years. Their service is great!
All GDrive features are long available and better on DriveHQ.com. Visit www.drivehq.com and watch the demo.
# Backup. DriveHQ Online Backup works great. It has a lot of high-end features, much better than GDrive, including versioning, scheduled backup, encrypted storage, compressed upload, incremental backup and resuming, etc.
# Sync. DriveHQ FileManager can sync multiple PCs, multiple user accounts.
# VPN-less access. You can access your data from anywhere using a web browser, any FTP client, or DriveHQ Cline software, or SMTP/POP3 email with Outlook!
# Collaborate. DriveHQ Group Account service is a true enterprise class collaboration platform. You can easily share folders to different people with different access rights. DriveHQ Group Account owner / admin can create/manage/delete sub-accounts.
# Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible as DriveHQ FileManager can cache the data for offline access! Plus you can access your emails offline with DriveHQ’s SMTP/POP3 email service using Outlook!
DriveHQ offers basic service for free. So why the hype and why the wait? Sign up at: http://www.drivehq.com/?refID=2925384
Sam,
Thanks for the link. I will check out the service. With your description it does sound like a full featured offering.
I don’t think Google’s offering is all that. They have an expensive and less accessible offering. However it is the horizontal integration with their services, makes this interesting. They also have a monopoly of sorts in that area.
Ideally I as a consumer should be able to utilize any web service and use any backend storage of my liking. Ofcourse this means that the services must talk and implement standard APIs. However this will give us the users an opportunity to leverage the best and most cost effective solutions.
Abhishek
[…] up with a GDrive like setup on the network, Google can easily offer a simple service on the handset. The key aspects being […]