After rumours that Google was launching a competitor to Dropbox, it appears the concept has finally arrived.
A spokesperson for Google told wired.com: “Starting today, Google Apps administrators will see new controls for Drive in the control panel. Users at organizations on the Rapid Release track will be able to opt-in to Drive at drive.google.com/start.”
Benefits of using this cloud-based app are the ability to upload and store just about anything you want including files, photos and documents. It also integrates with the other applications available such as GDocs.
The company also confirmed that Google Apps for Business users will get 5GB of free storage. Anything over this will cost $4 (about £2.50) per 20GB. The maximum that can be bought, I understand, is 16TB.
As Drive apparently uses the same infrastructure of all the other apps I think this could prove very popular, and if I’m right it could put pressure on the likes of Dropbox to come up with something that ensures they retain their customer base.
Personally speaking, I don’t think this will be easy as Dropbox itself is really only a storage system with sharing facilities; whereas “Drive” is an integrated application. In other words why would anyone want to leave their Google site just to upload a document to someone else’s site when they can do it automatically in Google?
In a sense it is similar to the all-inclusive holiday, and buying food and drink outside the complex.
Very sad for Dropbox, but it’s called competition.
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