The idea of Google Drive has been around for years. In fact, hacks that would turn your Google Docs account into a mountable virutal drive popped up almost immediately after Google Docs was released. What soon followed was years of speculation, rumors, and punditry that centered on whether or not Google was going to turn Google Docs into gDrive, and then, eventually, a full-on Google Drive. The day has finally come, Google has just announced Google Drive on its official Google Blog.
From the Official Google Blog:
Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.
Google Drive lets users create and collaborate on docs, store everything they can think of, and even search everything they upload. Google Drive gives users 5GB of storage space for free, but then lets customers upgrade to 25GB of storage space for $2.49 per month, 100GB of storage for $4.99 per month, or even a whopping 1TB of space for $49.99 per month. That’s a lot of potential space for relatively cheap. For example, Dropbox offers 50GB per month for $9.99 per month, and 100 GB per month for $19.99/month, which are all well over the prices set out by Google today. It’s pretty enticing. That said, Google Drive is not Dropbox. It does things differently, and from what we’ve seen early on, Drive has its own way of doing things.
Will people switch to Google Drive? Likely. Should they switch? We’ll leave that one up to you until we spend more time with it.
