Google has finally entered the cloud storage game fully with the debut of Google Drive. The problem is that, at least right now, it doesn’t stand out in a crowded field.
Google’s successful products have all had something that truly made them stand out, despite being later entrants in their market. Gmail was, and is, an extremely powerful email program with a lot of extras plus enough storage to satisfy just about anyone.
Google Analytics was an already great package that they made Free. Suddenly, real data that could help you make smart internet marketing decisions was available to everybody!
Google Drive, though, doesn’t have a lot to sell itself. It seems to do a good job of allowing you to store and access files, but so does Dropbox and some of the other cloud storage packages out there.
They are touting it’s integration with Google Docs, but even that doesn’t turn heads. It’s just ‘nice to have’ for the vast majority of people.
The amout of free storage is 5GB, more than Dropbox, but less than Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Again, good, but not the topper that could have sold it more. They do promise some future developments including fax and video editing, but that’s all down the road.
For now, you can grab the free space, then wait and see. But unless you use Google Docs a lot, there’s no compelling reason to make it your prime cloud server if you like what you have today.
You can see a full check of Google Drive and its features here:
Google Drive Hands-On