The long-awaited, much-rumored Google Drive — these days assumed to be something Dropbox-like but from the big G — is apparently going to be launched the first week of April, according to GigaOm‘s Om Malik.
The details:
According to the details from my sources, Google is going to offer 1 GB of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. The market leader Dropbox currently offers 2 GB for free. Google’s product will come with a local client and the web interface will look much like the Google Docs interface. Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain-specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive. My sources are impressed, so far with what they have seen.
If he’s right, it sounds like the GDrive will look a lot like what we saw leaked in February. Malik peppers his rumour with several maybes, primarily because GDrive rumours have been floating around since our ancestors first spied a monolith.
The question is: Is it going to be worth using Google Drive once it’s released? I’m a pretty loyal Dropbox customer at this point, and I know many who are. If Google’s going to make it worthwhile, it’s going to have to do something for users that they aren’t already getting from Dropbox. Otherwise Google is just going to be in another Google+ situation. (Oh, and 1GB seems awfully paltry, especially considering that my free Gmail account has over 7GB of storage space.)
Assuming Malik’s “well placed sources” are correct, I guess we’ll find out in April. Let’s hear what you think in the comments.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.