GDrive Coming Soon

This is probably the year of Google’s most important product launches. Even if they’re much rarer than last year, they are strategically important (personalization, universal search, machine translation, the mobile platform, social gadgets).

Wall Street Journal reports that Google plans to launch a service for storing files. Of course, we all know about GDrive, an internal Google project, and Google’s goal to store store 100% of user’s data. “With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc),” mentioned Google in some leaked annotations from a presentation.

But WSJ’s article certainly means that GDrive’s launch is very close. “Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.”

The article doesn’t mention the amount of free storage that will be offered, but Google will probably use the same strategy from Gmail and Picasa Web: some free storage that should be enough for most users and paid storage for everyone else.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on specific online storage plans aside from “storage is an important component of making Web [applications] fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives.”

View: Wall Street Journal
Source: googlesystem Blog