Google Drive: Finally coming this April
Google's online storage service, rumored to be called GDrive is like the wolf in the fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Well, after long history of false alarms, the storage drive might just see the day in early April, according to my well placed sources familiar with company's plans.
Context & Ripple Effects
GDrive has been one of tech's longest-running vaporware stories: a client leak surfaced in October 2006, code references appeared inside Google Apps by September 2007 (evidence of GDrive in Google Apps), and Google quietly secured the GoogleDrive.com domain that same month. Five years of false alarms later, GigaOM's sources now put the launch in early April 2012.
The pickup matters as much as the claim: eight outlets from Fast Company to Gizmodo UK ran the same report within a day, and it lands just as Google rebranded Android Market as Google Play — a move that only pays off if the company has somewhere for users to keep their content.
First-order effects
- Dropbox, Box and Microsoft's SkyDrive immediately gain a competitor whose storage can be pre-wired into Gmail, Docs and Android accounts rather than won through standalone signups.
- Google gets a single bucket for user files across its properties, completing the content layer the Google Play rebrand implies.
Second-order effects
- Rivals are pushed toward bigger free tiers and tighter platform integration to defend against distribution they cannot match, compressing standalone storage margins.
- Third-party developers gain a native storage API to build against, shifting file-sync features out of individual apps and onto Google's infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If Drive ships as expected, consumer cloud storage completes its shift from a paid standalone product to bundled platform infrastructure — the durable asset being the account relationship and the data gravity around it, not the gigabytes.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is consolidating from standalone subscription products into free platform utilities attached to operating systems and account ecosystems.