Google always pitched Google Drive, which launched in April after a considerable period of hype, as a replacement for Google Docs. What many users didn’t realize, it seems, is that Google will indeed completely replace Google Docs with Drive later this year. While Drive is still opt-in at this time, it looks like the forced transition is coming soon, as Google has started to alert users that their Google Docs account will soon be “upgraded to Google Drive.” → Read More
Ever since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google’s cloud-centric operating system, would look like. Today, Google released the first developer version of ChromeOS 20 with support for Google Drive. As expected, Google Drive is now deeply integrated into the ChromeOS file manager, though this is clearly just a first effort and still needs quite a bit of work. → Read More
At the end of Dropbox’s “Hey, we have a huge new office!” event today in San Francisco, some reporters cornered CEO Drew Houston and asked him about the big cloud news of the week — the launch of Dropbox competitor Google Drive.
Initially, Houston said he didn’t have time to really comment, because he had to catch a flight (which almost sounds like an excuse to duck the question, but the Dropbox folks had actually mentioned the flight earlier). When pressed, he pointed out that there have been rumors about Google Drive since the beginning of time: “It’s been on the horizon since we founded the company.” → Read More
Google finally launched its long-rumored Google Drive online storage service today. This was probably one of Google’s worse-kept secrets, so the launch itself wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone – least of all Dropbox, which – until today – was pretty much synonymous with online storage for documents.
If nothing else, Google Drive is a full-frontal assault on Dropbox on virtually every level. Google is not just massively undercutting Dropbox’s pricing scheme, but thanks to integrating Drive with Docs, it is also able to offer far more features. With this kind of competition, the future doesn’t look good for Dropbox. → Read More
Today’s launch of Google Drive, official at last, is kind of a relief. Internet rumors and reports have seen the industry discussing the possibility of a consumer-facing cloud storage service called “GDrive,” since as far back as 2006. Of course, then, the product in development was an internal-only tool used by Google employees – not the Dropbox-like competitor Google launched today.
Still, to say that we’ve been waiting for GDrive for a long, long, long time would be the understatement of the year. → Read More
You can try Google Drive now at drive.google.com. → Read More
After years of rumors, it looks like the Google Drive has finally arrived. While we are still waiting for official word from Google, but earlier today, the company apparently mistakenly posted the French translation of its announcement to its French blog (and quickly deleted it, of course). Thankfully, intrepid Google+ user Gerwin Sturm made a copy and ran it through Google translate. → Read More
If you needed any more proof that Google Drive was alive, look no further than this screenshot of the app. I’ve been able to download and run the app and it is currently idle, sitting quietly in the corner, unable to connect to the mothership.
The version we were given is 1.0.2891 and seems to run without issue. I was able to log in using my Gmail account and I suppose I’ll have to wait to play with it further. It currently throws an error stating that “Google Drive is not yet enabled for your account.” → Read More
Rumors and reports of Google Drive’s imminent launch have been coming hard and fast lately, but this one may just take the cake. The folks at The Next Web managed to get their hands on a draft of an announcement from one of Google’s official Drive partners, and have just revealed a few titillating details about the storage-service-that-almost-wasn’t.
Earlier reports noted that the long-awaited cloud storage service would make its official debut sometime this week, but that no longer appears to be the case. Instead, Google Drive will reportedly launch next week, bestowing all interested users with 5GB of free storage to play with right out of the gate.
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Box has become a major player in the tech world since its launch some six years ago. The company, which provides cloud data storage and enterprise collaboration tools, has more than doubled its headcount in the past year alone to a staff of more than 400, attracted more than $150 million in venture capital, and currently counts more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers. But it’s not time for Box to rest easy just yet: Google is widely understood to finally be on the brink of launching its own long-rumored file storage service, Google Drive.
But according to Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, he is just fine with the impending arrival of a new big-name competitor. In an interview held this week at Box’s Silicon Valley headquarters (which you can watch in the video embedded above), Levie said that Google will no doubt make a splash with the launch of GDrive. But he’s confident that Box’s singular focus on cloud storage will keep many users, and particularly paying customers such as companies, choosing it over its larger competitors. → Read More
Evidence of Google Drive’s existence has been sporadically surfacing for months now, and MG reported last September that Google employees have been using the reborn service in-house for a while now.
Now, as the service’s supposed launch draws ever closer, we’re starting to get our first clear glimpses at what Google’s had under lock and key for so long. According to a leaked screenshot obtained by TalkAndroid, Google Drive could offer even more functionality than earlier reports suggested — if legitimate, then Google Drive users could have access to 5GB of free storage right out of the gate. Their mysterious source also confirmed to them that the service is on track for an official launch in just over two weeks on April 16. → Read More
A reader of Geekwire has sent in what he claims is a shot of Google Drive, which apparently has activated early for him. It’s entirely possible that the shot is fake — Google’s stark interface isn’t exactly difficult to recreate. There are no obvious red flags we can see, though, and it jibes with the presumably legit screen seen briefly at a Google-sponsored event back in 2011. → Read More
In case there was still any doubt about the long-rumored “GDrive’s” existence, a page now appearing on Google’s search results offers a pretty clear indication that something is going on. On Writely.com – the online word processing service Google acquired in 2006 – a test page is now appearing with a title that reads “test page for Platypus (GDrive).”
Well, there you have it. → Read More
About a month ago, some additions to the code in Chromium (the open source browser behind Chrome) suggested that the long-fabled “GDrive” may be on the verge of actually launching. A week later, user-facing proof started appearing. Then earlier today, sharp-eyed social media consultant, Johannes Wigand, spotted something interesting during a presentation at a Google-sponsored event: something that sure looks a lot like Google Drive.
And it is.
Over the past month, we’ve been able to dig up more information about Google Drive. First of all, it is very real. And it is being used internally at Google. Of course, it was also real back in 2007 and 2008 before it was eventually killed. But talking to employees back then who saw and used the service all agreed that it was pretty wonky and not ready for prime time. This new version is expected to be much better. → Read More
About a week ago, I noted that Google may be on the verge of resurrecting the “GDrive” project, also known as “Google Drive”. The service, which was previously used internally at Google under the codename “Platypus”, was killed off in 2008. But code found in Chromium recently suggested that it may be making a comeback. Specifically, there was a note to add the non-existant (to the public) drive.google.com domain to a secure list in the browser’s code. Today brings another clue.
We’ve just been tipped about some language inside of Google Docs which also points to Google Drive. Apparently, when some users go to delete a document in the recently-updated UI, they’re getting a message that the “items have been removed from your Google Drive”. There you go. → Read More
In 2006, Google was internally testing a project codenamed “Platypus”, an online storage service. When it was accidentally disclosed during an analyst meeting as “GDrive”, it quickly captured the web’s imagination. Google seemed on the verge of transforming their servers into our own personal hard drives in the cloud. Plenty of startups were working on this (and still are), but the presumption was that Google would be able to scale this beyond anyone else and do it for free, or very cheap. Google refused to talk about it, but story after story after story kept coming.
Then something weird happened: GDrive never actually launched.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that we found out what happened, thanks to Steven Levy’s book In The Plex. In 2008, GDrive was about to launch under Bradley Horowitz (now a lead on Google+), but Sundar Pichai (now the SVP of Chrome) convinced Google’s top executives not to launch it. The reason? He felt like the concept of a “file” was outdated (sounds more than a bit Jobsian) in the cloud-based universe that Google was trying to build. After some debate, the powers that be at Google agreed and GDrive was shelved, and the team moved over to the Chrome team.
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Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped received and attempted to install a leaked copy of the GDrive client being used by Google employees. He was unable to login after installing (our belief is it must be used from an approved IP address) it but posted some interesting information. Platypus syncs an online copy of selected files with a downloaded local version. Users can share by individual or project and can provide view or edit permission for individual users. GDrive shows up as a separate drive icon on users’ computers and can be accessed via a static URL. Internal users by default get a mere 500 MB of storage each. Philipp posted the Platypus Help file for Windows and Linux as well. There’s no evidence that the program is set for public launch any time soon, but hints supporting such speculation have been popping up now and again for some time. Here’s a quick timeline of previous TechCrunch coverage of the illusive GDrive product: In March Google held an analyst day that included documentation of a future offering called Google Drive, emphasizing security, cross application, platform and device access. The information was quickly taken offline but Michael Arrington wrote a summary of “what we know” about Google Drive to date. In an April post about Microsoft’s forthcoming Live Drive, Michael Arrington wrote the following. “From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously).” In July Corsin Camichel discovered a brief description of GDrive on the newly acquired Writely servers, which was quickly mirrored before Google took it down. Not a whole lot of details but it was seen as some level of confirmation of the project’s existence. If we needed any proof that Platypus at least exists, today’s leak might be it. Some people say (Paul Graham for example) that the best way to predict what Google will develop well for commercial release is to watch what they use internally. A lot has changed since we wrote our overview of online storage in January. Watch for the release of ZohoDrive soon as well. Does this leak mean anything in particular? It’s hard to know, but there’s at → Read More
Another hint at a coming online storage service from Google has been discovered by bloggers and quickly taken down. Corsin Camichel took the smart if logical step of adding index.html to the end of Google’s Writely.com URL and found a page allegedly detailing a Google storage service, codenamed Platypus. Since being blogged about, the page is offline (the link is to a mirror). Since the entire story is based solely on this one screen shot, this is little more than a highly speculative rumor at this point. We wrote about GDrive in March when information about the product was released by Google in an analyst presentation. Nothing seems to have come of it yet. There are any number of Google services under development and many bloggers complain (myself included) once they are released that they fail to meet expectations. Why then all the hype today over a single page on another domain about possible service features? Apparently Vista uses perpetual delay announcements to secure mindshare pre-launch and Google gets to reap the benefits from playing whack-a-mole with bloggers eager to chase after any whiff of a service that could launch some day. Wake me up when there is reason to believe that launch is coming. → Read More
We have all the ingredients for a great story: dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors. Here’s what we know so far: Epic 2015 – Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives In the spring of 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson presented the ominous Epic 2014 (now renamed Epic 2015) that ultimately predicts that Google will force the New York Times to shut down. In the movie, they also predict that Google will launch something called “Google Grid”: “…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.” See the movie here. Google Drive Discussion with Analysts Robin and Matt’s Google Grid prediction seems to be well on its way to becoming reality. On March 2, 2006 (a few days ago), Google hosted an analyst day and presented a wide range of information on new products and strategies. Among the information was a description of the upcoming “Google Drive”, a place for users to store 100% of their data online. On page 19 of the presentation, Google stated the following: Store 100% of User 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). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user. As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine. Another important → Read More
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