Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service

This should be interesting. All Google needs to do for Drive to be "better" than Dropbox is create a clone, integrate it with my existing Google account, and have higher storage limits.<p>I'd say it's just as likely as not that they'll manage to create something worse, even with the with Dropbox as a nearly static target for 5 years.<p>Somehow Big Co's almost always manage to screw up even the relatively easy things.

I never understood why Google would give me 8GB of free email storage (of which I use less than 1 GB), but limits my picasa storage to 1024 MB. They need to homogenize their product lineup and just give me an amount N of storage and let me decide how I want to use that.

Is "Drive" really a good name for storage? Especially if another branch of the company is developing technology for cars and another branch is developing traffic maps and traffic reporting technology.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. This pretty much sums up why I will continue to use, and pay, for my Dropbox service for documents. I do not see how integration with Google's other services is a useful thing. They are just files. Now my photos and music, well Google already does that.<p>The good news is that Dropbox should integrate search soon. They will have to in order to keep up. Competition is a good thing for consumers.

Store the rest of your files with the biggest ad company? If you want ads to be uncomfortably relevant to you, go ahead.

About time! I've always thought Google could surely offer ridiculously large storage limits for free. Same goes with cloud hosting.

BTW, the article mentions Dropbox raising $250 million. If I'm not mistaken, youtube had only raised about a tenth of that by the time it was acquired, and they had to stream videos, and I guess storage (and bandwidth) was more expensive back then. Does anyone know what Dropbox does with so much money?

I'd use them immediately given command line tools, and open protocols/apis.

so whats Sundar Pichai - the guy who convinced goolges top management in 2008 to kill - the ready for launch - GDrive because files are "deprecated", "ungoogly" and a "thing of the past" doing nowadays?<p>according to his linkedin profile <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&#38;authType=name&#38;authToken=VVYk&#38;locale=en_US&#38;pvs=pp&#38;trk=ppro_viewmore" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5635&#38;authType=na...</a> you should contact him for "career opportunities"

<i>people familiar with the matter</i><p>This peculiar phrase appears four times in the article. Is it journalist-code for something?

Maybe they will allow users to use public key encryption (like mozy does). Oh wait, Google makes all of their money by reading our documents/emails and watching all of our online behavior. I'm sure this service will be no different.

The only way Google can win over competition now, is if they provide unlimited storage (remember when Gmail first launched?). Also, can they also announce the shutdown of G+ while they're at launching of a new service?

I'm not saying that Google is untrustworthy but with the way they've been acting the past few years the idea of giving them my files feels a bit creepy.<p><i>Eric Schmidt: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.</i><p>Edited to add: I think it is preferable to spread information among service providers rather than concentrate it in one provider's hands. Google already has my search and email information. I do not think it advisable to add information from files to that.