Google has today released its long awaited Google drive a free cloud storage application that offers 5GB free cloud storage to store things such as word documents, presentations, spreadsheets, photos PDFs and many other things. This is already a very crowded market with competitors on a personal storage level such as Dropbox and box then there is also the competition on a more corporate level from services such as Egnyte. However Google has a pretty good way to get into this market, apart from the massive brand recognition they hold, Google also possess a wide range of apps that they will integrate into the service. Their web based email solution Gmail has a huge users base who will find this useful also well as their Google docs applications. Google docs has great collaborative feature which are also part of the new Google Drive service so it will make it very easy to share things that are too big to be shared via an email attachment.
Personally I think this service will take off well for Google as they have such a broad market, I imagine people using this who have never even heard of cloud storage before, as they will see it in the media because of the hype around Google. I think Dropbox should be scared.
The service will also caters to the higher end markets with paid options, these include the ability to upgrade to 25GB service for $2.49 a month, 100GB for $4.99 a month and finally 1TB for $49.99 a month. Google also states that their search will be built into the drive so you can search your drive by keyword, file owner, file type and other advanced criteria.
The service is already available for PC, Mac and Android and will soon be out for iOS devices. It will be interesting to see just how well this competes with Dropbox with the power of Google behind it.
To get google drive go here
