Category : Productivity

Back in 2007, someone said to me:

“GMail. That’s like my briefcase now. It’s free but what if they were to go away? I’d lose all my stuff. Therefore, I can’t let them go away, that’s how they have so much value.”

The Cloud Storage War. Photo taken in Burlington, VT.

That’s when the “cloud” all made business sense to me. Put simply, they have power over your stuff. Five years later, last week, we witnessed that power. Google Mail went down for a few minutes. It caused a crazy panic. It was covered nationally. The Onion lampooned with, “Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power”. The firm I work at, for example, runs Google Apps. Many of our six thousand clients do too. We were completely crippled.

In the five years that I’ve understood the power of the Cloud has come Dropbox, Box.net, Apple’s iCloud and a Microsoft offering. Dropbox has probably done the best with the functionality/usability of the format, allowing users to seamlessly drag and drop with their desktop-based files and folders.

Google up until now has taken a different approach with both Mail, Docs, Picasa, etc. They have been more web based and more convoluted in the sense of just trying to simply sync files from the desktop. Finally, Google has taken on the Dropbox idea.

From what I can tell from the marketing, it’s like Google Docs with a “drive” app you can download for your desktop, tablet, or phone. iOS version is coming too, but I wouldn’t get excited about that yet. It seems to integrate with Gmail, Google+, and some other Google products. It’s easy to be skeptical about integration with Google however, as it seems they can have stuff all over the map.

Here’s the feature run-down from TechCrunch:

• as expected, users will get 5GB of free storage space
• additional space can be bought, of course, starting at 20GB for $4/month
• Google Drive will be deeply integrated into Google Docs. Indeed, Google calls it the “next evolution” of Google Docs.
• the web-based file viewer will be able to handle 30 file types, including Photoshop, Illustrator and HD video
• PC, Mac and Android apps will launch today. An iOS app will launch in the coming weeks.
• Google promises a 99.9% uptime
• there will be a focus on search, including some support for OCR and image recognition