The world is slowly shifting towards being a Google-dominated society…well, at least on the Internet, that is. News broke today by the Wall Street Journal hinted that the search engine giant is very close to launching a cloud-storage service that many think will rival Silicon Valley’s best startup (as named by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm during the 2011 Crunchies) Dropbox. Being called “Drive”, it’s Google’s attempt to catch up to all the innovation being done in the cloud-storage space by younger and leaner companies. But is it actually Google’s loss for rolling something out so late in the game? It only seems logical for Google to have this cloud-storage product rolled out today now that they have most of the other pieces in play already. But we’ll get into that in a bit…but for now, let’s look at what the Wall Street Journal says about Drive:
Drive will most likely mimic all the features that one currently gets out of Dropbox or any of the other cloud-storage services. It’ll allow you to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they will be accessible from any web-enabled device (tablet, laptop, desktop, and mobile). According to the WSJ, “if a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file.” The service is set to launch within the next few weeks or months and, like all the other competitors in this crowded field, will offer a freemium model where most people will get a free account, but if you need more space and additional features, then you can pay for a premium account. Just how much space is allotted for the free version remains in question, but with the average space limitations from Dropbox, Oxygen Cloud, Box, and others being about 5GB (Dropbox is actually 2GB), it probably won’t shock me if Google tries to one-up it and give up to 10GB in storage. That’s all a guess since Google will want to give people enough of a carrot to try their service, fall in love, and convert to a paid account. We shall see…
But how will Drive ever catch up to what many consider to be the industry leader, Dropbox? Well probably by offering free accounts to all of their Gmail accounts (350 million users)–that will easily gain it more users than Dropbox (45 million users). Sure, Google would gain instant fame, but the hard part is to entice the users to keep using the service. And that might be Google’s greatest challenge, but it isn’t too far-fetched of an thing to solve. Already, Google has its grips in us with email and millions of us are also addicted to using Google Docs as well and now with 25 million active Google+ accounts all tied to your Gmail account, it seems that the search engine is going to want to be managing your Internet experience. And I hate to mention it as well, but imagine the additional revenue stream that Google will get by serving ads within their cloud-storage interface? They could easily create some algorithm that not only currently scans your email, Google+ activity, documents, and search history, but with Drive, they can offer contextual ads based on what music, videos, and files you have stored in the Cloud. Scary, but the potential is there.
GigaOm is saying that “Drive would be yet another in an array of new consumer services from Google which added Google+ web conferencing and collaboration in June…Google Music which stores users’ audio collections…adding consumer cloud storage service is another way for Google to leverage its prodigious infrastructure.” And they’re right. Google has slowly got themselves in order and realized that they need to start releasing all the pieces to the public and eventually it’ll all form together, like Voltron, to create an immersive Internet experience that allows the user to do everything that they want, while allowing Google to strengthen its offering while also enhancing their search engine and advertising monster capabilities.
I suppose now we take the “wait and see” approach. When they’ll launch it remains to be seen, but hopefully there’s a big enough selling point that separates it from Dropbox or it’s just going to be another cloud-storage service and we’ll wonder why it was even hyped up to begin with.
