Google is about to big foot its way into the cloud storage business, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
With its “Drive” or “G-drive” service — which has been rumored for some time — Google would take on some very popular consumer-oriented cloud storage entrants, notably Dropbox and Apple’s iCloud. Such offerings act as virtual closets for people’s digital photos, documents and music, allowing them to upload and access their material from many devices.
According to the report, posted late Wednesday:
The Google service, which is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months, will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files, the people familiar with the matter said.
Drive would be yet another in an array of new consumer services from Google which added Google+ web conferencing and collaboration in June to compete with Facebook and Skype. Google retains its lead in Internet search but has seen less success in with these newer, ancillary services. Still, adding consumer cloud storage service is another way for Google to leverage its prodigious infrastructure.
Dropbox has seen huge adoption — it claimed more than 45 million customers last fall. Customers use it not only for archiving their pictures and documents, but to manage and sync those files between devices.
But it’s not just Dropbox and iCloud — there are several competitive services like BackBlaze all of which offer users free storage up to a point — in Dropbox’s case up to 2 GB. Users with up to 50 GB of storage pay $ 9.99 a month. There are also more business-oriented cloud services like Box, (formerly Box.net) that are gaining traction.
Given the proliferation of millions camera-toting cell phones and the explosion of digital music, the appetite for cloud storage is likewise booming. It makes sense for Google to fight for its share of that action.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user brionv
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