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Google Drive Launching Next Week With 5GB Free Space

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-their-autonomous-car-project dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Next Web is reporting that Google Drive, the search giant's long anticipated cloud storage service, is set to launch next week. From the article: 'What's interesting though is that Google is planning to start everyone with 5 GB of storage. Of course you can buy more, but that trumps Dropbox's 2 GB that is included with every account. Dropbox does make it easy to get more space, including 23 GB of potential upgrades for HTC users. What's also interesting is the wording related to how the system will work. It's been long-thought that Windows integration will come easy, but that getting the Google Drive icon into the Mac a la Dropbox would be a bit harder. From what we're reading, Google Drive will work "in desktop folders" on both Mac and Windows machines, which still leaves the operation question unanswered.'"

11 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Google Drive by StevenBielberg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

    I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data - I would use a professional hosting service with SLA and company that has no need to mine my data.

    Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too. On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them. They already have this problem in other markets.

    1. Re:Google Drive by StevenBielberg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Gmail was done remarkably better and offered much larger storage than their competitors. Yet, Gmail still didn't win Hotmail or Yahoo which to date are the two largest email providers on planet.

      However, it doesn't seem like this is the case with Google Drive. It actually looks like they don't bring anything new or innovative to the table either, and in fact, might have a worse service than Dropbox and other companies have (not even having good software for OS X or Linux). They also don't offer that much more space either.

      The cloud storage landscape and internet in 2012 is vastly different from email and Gmail when it launched.

    2. Re:Google Drive by Missing.Matter · · Score: 5, Informative

      You must be pretty young to not remember a time when someone might have had to actually delete messages before they received new ones because they ran out of storage in their inbox. We're talking services that offered like 2mb for storage. Then Google came around and offered an entire gigabyte, promising to never have to worry about your inbox capacity again. This absolutely caused many people to switch to gmail. When hotmail and others realized this, they followed suit and started upping their mailbox capacity to match gmail's.

    3. Re:Google Drive by Missing.Matter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Gmail offered 1gb of mail storage per user while the competition offered something like 2mb. For Google Drive to be equally impressive, I'd expect them to offer 1.25tb of cloud storage per user. :P

    4. Re:Google Drive by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't necessarily disagree with your arguments but I'd like to offer arguments to each:

      1. Googles target audience is not the corporate user. It's people at home that want to backup photos and such. These people will probobly have a google account, a dropbox account, etc... etc.. The more places you can backup your data the better. If Google drops the product, oh well.

      2. I don' think this needs a "Good amount of users" Much like microsoft, Google wants to offer you every option. They don't want to force you to use another companies product simply because they don't offer a "google version" The biggest threat that Google would ever face would be a company offering something they do not, and then that something becoming ubiquitous enough that the rival company could offer the same service that Google does and kill off their business (see facebook)

      3. Google, like every other corporation on earth, doesn't give a shit about anti-competition regulation. They can, just like Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else, just ignore it... then, when sued, draw out the court battle so long that the companies in question will die long before any litigation is resolved. Even if they do not, the fines levied are almost always so small they are a joke. If I get a speeding ticket, the fine is about 3 days pay for me. How about when a buisness gets a fine they get a similar fine... 3days gross income. Well, that's another topic.

    5. Re:Google Drive by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 5, Informative

      Nobody is using skydrive

      I like SkyDrive, but the max file size (50 megs IIRC?) means that for me it's dead in the water. I realize MS is concerned about people using it to trade pirated movies and music, but it also means the service is pretty useless. If I can't even send my parents a video of their granddaughter playing in the park, or singing happy birthday, what's the point?

  2. WebDAV access? by DdJ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We'll have to see. If the new "GDrive" can be securely accessed via the open, standard WebDAV protocol, I'll think it's interesting and I'll be an enthusiastic adopter. If not, then it's just another cloud file locker that uses proprietary client software (or a web UI, no good for integration work), which is considerably less interesting.

  3. Re:Privacy? by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Put a TrueCrypt partition on the drive. Encryption needs to be done at the ends; they are just providing a bit storage medium.

  4. Re:5 GB by jader3rd · · Score: 5, Informative

    5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings

    SkyDrive is 25 GB and free.

  5. Question before I sign up by Tokolosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is my data stored in the US?

    Does the US government claim to have jurisdiction over my data? (I think I know the answer to this one).

    --
    Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
  6. No sync for that 25GB SkyDrive! by zaimoglu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Microsoft has got it all wrong with the SkyDrive. Firstly, there are TWO DIFFERENT services: (1) SkyDrive gives you 25GB of free cloud space but WITHOUT synchronization capabilities, so you need to manually keep track of your files, (2) a synchronization service that goes by the name of Live SkyDrive or LiveMesh, with only 5GB space. This second service is the one that can truly be compared to Dropbox. The problems with SkyDrive are not limited to this mind boggling confusion. The 25GB service does not allow you to upload folders. You MUST manually create your folders and only then can you upload your files, though you can select more than one file at this stage. Microsoft really expects you to carefully examine your directory tree and create folders manually!