Google (Finally) Releasing Dropbox Competitor

You know, for a cloud computing company, Google sure hasn’t done much with cloud storage. As great as Google Docs is, it isn’t a Dropbox alternative. What will be a Dropbox alternative, though, is Google Drive, the rumored new service Google is planning on rolling out for file synchronization.

Dropbox makes it impossibly easy to share files between machines. Download the client, point it toward the folders you want to synchronize, and watch as it keeps everything in sync between the machines. Thy even have a mobile client, letting you download and access your files on the go. These are things that Google hasn’t yet made it easy to do, but that may be about to change.

Google Drive would integrate into Google services, as you would expect, so you should expect google Docs integration. Also, like most Google services, you should expect the entry level account to be free. And, because it is a massive company like Google running the show, you should expect premium plans to be quite cheap, more than capable of undercutting Dropbox’s pricing plans. And that is about all we know about the service.

The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, claims that the service is slated for release any time now, mere weeks or months away.

The timing of this seems suspicious to me. right now, we also have a strange, new in-home multimedia device that Google is planning on releasing, running a modified version of Android.

Both Google Drive and their new entertainment platform are interesting by themselves, but when you combine them, you get something far more interesting. I think Google might be making a play for home networking in a big way, trying to capture both the device market and the file synchronization market. Only a few of the more expensive in-home multimedia centers actually allow for simple network streaming of media, and Google’s new device could offer it out of the box.

But that is, of course, speculation. Here’s hoping.

WallStreetJournal Photo by : devioustree