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.”

What’s coming next, according to Google’s official transition documents, is an opt-out phase similar to what the company has done when it transitioned to the new Gmail interface recently. Judging from the messages that many users are now seeing in Google Docs, this phase is going to start soon.

Finally, Google says, “users will be fully transitioned to Google Drive, with no ability to opt out.” Overall, Google expects the transition from what it calls the “Google Documents List” to Google Drive by late summer 2012.

Given that Google Drive is essentially an upgrade to Google Docs with more storage and functionality, chances are most users won’t mind the transition. Unlike the rather controversial Gmail design changes lately (and Google’s move to add Google+ to each and every one of its products), Google Drive is generally perceived to be a genuine upgrade to Docs. Still, there will always be a contingent of users who would prefer the status quo.

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.

The Google Drive integration is rather basic in this first release. Drive currently appears as an additional folder in the ChromeOS file manager. While the file manager now features a column called “available offline,” I wasn’t able to actually find a way to download my Google Drive files to the laptop’s internal storage, though. There also wasn’t a clear path for uploading files from the file manager to Google Drive (though you can obviously always use the Drive web app to upload and download files). It’s obviously only a matter of time before this functionality becomes available, though. For now, Google Drive’s advanced search features also aren’t available through the file manager’s interface.

Adding support for Google Drive also puts more emphasis on the file manager in ChromeOS. In the early days of ChromeOS, the file manager was more or less hidden from sight. Over time, though, it clearly became obvious to Google that its users weren’t quite ready for an OS without the ability to manage their files in the way they had become accustomed to.

If you haven’t looked at the developer versions of ChromeOS for a while, you will notice that it looks quite a bit different now compared to just a few weeks ago. Google now uses Aura, a hardware-accelerated window manager for ChromeOS, which allows you to open multiple browser windows and not just one window like before. ChromeOS now also features a Windows-like taskbar at the bottom of the screen.

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.”

Okay, but what did he think of the product itself? Did it measure up to his expectations? Houston replied that it was “kind of hard to know what to expect from them.” The bottom line however, is, “I still feel really good about the stuff we’re building.”

So, nothing too surprising. Frederic Lardinois actually offered his own take on what this means for Dropbox, though really, my favorite comment on the matter came earlier from Houston on Twitter: “In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine. “

Google finally launched its long-rumored Google Drive online storage service today. This was probably one of Google’s worst-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 might not be so bright for Dropbox.

It’s not just Google, though. Just yesterday, Microsoft also launched its new SkyDrive apps, which also replicate Dropbox’s functionality and add more tools to it. Indeed, besides undercutting Dropbox’s pricing, the one area where Google and Microsoft are easily one-upping the popular startup is in the suite of tools they offer around their clones.

In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine.

— Drew Houston (@drewhouston) April 24, 2012

The question then is, what’s next for Dropbox? It was always pretty obvious that the big players wouldn’t just ignore this market and leave it to a few scrappy startups. Google’s and Microsoft’s marketing power and scale could easily overwhelm whatever momentum Dropbox had until now.

To remain competitive, Dropbox will have to seriously cut its prices and improve its feature set at the same time. That’s a tough call for a relatively small company. While Google doesn’t really need to make money from selling storage, it’s those kind of services that make Dropbox and co. viable businesses.

As Posterous co-founder and YCombinator partner Garry Tan noted before the Google Drive launch, Dropbox may have an advantage over others by being platform agnostic – especially on mobile. Even there, though, times are changing. Google is obviously going to deeply integrate Drive into Android, but it will also launch an iOS app. Microsoft is going to bring SkyDrive to Windows Phone and iOS, too – though it’s still questionable if it will ever come to Android, too. Apple is the odd one out here, because it is so focused on its own ecosystem and because its iCloud offers a very different vision of what cloud storage should look like.

Dropbox may be platform agnostic, but the funny thing is, most of the big players don’t just cater to their own platforms anymore either.

As usual, Google’s (and Microsoft’s and Apple’s) competitors will say that this move validates their model and that they welcome a new competitor, but at the end of the day, Google’s entry is only making life tougher (too tough?) for Box, Dropbox and all the other cloud storage startups.

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.

For those of you with shorter memories, a trip down memory lane:

The first time we ever casually referred to something as “GDrive,” was when detailing an internal application that placed an icon on Googlers’ computers, giving them a mere 500 MB of storage. There was no evidence that the program was being prepared for public launch any time soon back then, despite user interest…not to mention obsessive blog coverage about the possibilities.

Back then, the cloud storage race was just beginning. Box was founded in 2005 and there were even reports that Microsoft would be launching its own GDrive-like service, code-named “Live Drive,” beating Google to the punch. As it turns out, Microsoft (with what we now know as SkyDrive) did beat Google to launch, as did many other cloud storage services, including notably, Box and Dropbox (founded 2007), both of which have been busy building successful businesses in the cloud storage and collaboration space.

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie even recently told TechCrunch TV, how his company is not afraid of Google Drive. Without discrediting the service – after all, Google is a big name – Levie said his company believes enterprise customers are looking to platform-agnostic players these days to help them manage information at scale, and especially to those focused exclusively on business and enterprise security needs.

Google had the opportunity to take the lead in the cloud storage space, but passed. Several months before Dropbox raised its $7.2 million A round in late 2009, consumers were still clamoring for a cloud dropbox of sorts from Google. A TechCrunch poll in 2008, had some 77% of respondents voting, “yes, I’ve been waiting like forever!” when asked if they would use GDrive.

And yet, no GDrive ever appeared.

By 2010, the world had practically given up on an “official” GDrive product. When Google added the ability to upload any file type to Google Docs, that was enough for Mike Arrington to proclaim “GDrive Launches” – after all, if you could put any file in the cloud, isn’t that GDrive enough for you?

But Google wasn’t having it. “This is not GDrive,” Google Docs product manager Vijay Bangaru told Arrington at the time. When asked why not, he replied, “…because GDrive doesn’t exist.”

Party-pooper.

Meanwhile, other startups came in to the fill the void left by our drag-and-drop to the cloud needs. Besides early players Box and Dropbox, one company, Memeo even went so far as to name its virtual drive feature “GDrive” back in 2010, if you can believe it.

Then for awhile, all was quiet on the GDrive front. It wasn’t until mid-2011 that GDrive’s rebirth really made the news once again. The internal project from 2006 (code-named “Platypus”) had been killed off back in 2008 – it never became a public-facing service. The concept for a Google-backed cloud service remained, however.

In August 2011, the URL drive.google.com appeared in Chromium code reviews. It’s alive!, the blogosphere proclaimed. And in September, more language was discovered inside Google Docs, pointing to Google Drive.

It was coming. For real this time.

The new version was said to be nothing like the wonky Platypus, but more of a way to enhance Google Docs. The hope? That users would finally get it: Docs can, indeed, host more than Office-type files (i.e., word documents, spreadsheets, presentations). More importantly, it would allow for syncing files between your PC and mobile devices and cloud.

And now here it is, April 2012, and Google has finally gotten around to revealing GDrive. But does anyone still care? Users who really needed such a service have since migrated elsewhere. When Dropbox raised its $250M Series B in October, it was boasting over 45 million users. Now it has over 50 million. Box.net, meanwhile, raised $50M in September, touting 7 million users.  Today, that’s 10 million.

Google says there are 40 million Google Apps users, including 4 million businesses, to give you an idea of the size of Google’s customer base.

Today’s Google Drive is GDocs+ – it has OCR, it has an API for apps! – but it’s no longer tapping into the pent-up, unsatisfied demand for a decent cloud storage and sync service. People who use Google Docs might try it, but if they’re already satisfied with the alternatives – the platform-agnostic, popular alternatives – they may just skip it.

After six years of waiting, though, some of us have to take a quick peek.

You can now try Google Drive, Google’s Dropbox competitor, at drive.google.com.

UPDATE – The app is now available for download and I installed it, creating a folder on my computer that acts as a GDrive sync area. All of my Google Docs appeared as “icons” in the folder.

And I was able to drag in files from my PC.

Files that I added to the local folder appeared in the web interface instantly.

As you can see, the functionality works as expected and was nearly seamless. Free accounts get 5GB of space and you can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 a month. One hundred gigabytes of storage can be had for $4.99 a month, and 1TB will set you back $49.99 monthly. Upgrading to a paid account will also boost the available storage space on your GMail account to 25GB. The documents that appear in the computer’s folder are actually links to Google Docs which open a separate browser window for editing. For example, this is the contents of one .gdoc file on my PC:

No text is stored in the actual .gdoc file.

As a bonus, Google just announced the availability of 10GB of storage in GMail, up from the standard 7GB “to celebrate today’s launch of Google Drive.”

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 François Bacconnet made a copy and shared it on Google’s social network.

Update: Google Drive is now live.

Assuming the post is genuine – and we have no reason to believe it is not – here is what we now know about Google Drive:

• as expected, users will get 5GB of free storage space
• additional space can be bought, of course, starting at 20GB for $4/month
• Google Drive will be deeply integrated into Google Docs. Indeed, Google calls it the “next evolution” of Google Docs.
• the web-based file viewer will be able to handle 30 file types, including Photoshop, Illustrator and HD video
• PC, Mac and Android apps will launch today. An iOS app will launch in the coming weeks.
• Google promises a 99.9% uptime
• there will be a focus on search, including some support for OCR and image recognition

Here is the full post courtesy of Google+ user Gerwin Sturm and Google Translate (you can find the French original here):

Posted by Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President, Google Chrome & Apps

Today we launch Google Drive, a centralized space where you can create, share, collaborate and store all your documents. You establish a budget with your staff that you develop a presentation with a working group or hosting a seminar, you can now do it in Drive. Download and access all your documents, videos, photos, Google Docs, PDF, etc..
Next step in the evolution of Google Docs and functionality of downloading any material, Drive will allow you to live, work and play in the Cloud.

Google Drive, you can:
Create and collaborate. Google Docs is integrated directly into Google Drive, allowing you to work in real time with colleagues on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Add and reply to comments on any media (PDF, image, videotape, etc.) and be informed when other people comment on or wish to share documents with you

Keep your documents securely and access anywhere and any device connected to the Internet. All your documents are just … there. Whatever happens. Drive you can install on your Mac, PC or download the application Drive on your phone or Android tablet. IOS version of the application will be available in the coming weeks. Drive is also accessible to visually impaired people using a screen reader tool

Search All. Search by keyword and filter by document type, owner, activity, etc.. Drive can even recognize the text content of a document scanned by technology OCR. For example, if you download the scanned image of an old newspaper clipping, you can search using one of the words quoted in the article. We have even begun to tap the image recognition: if you upload a picture of the Eiffel Tower in Drive, the next time you search the term [Eiffel Tower], the image will appear in the results

Open more than 30 types of documents directly from a Web browser – including high-definition video, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop – even without the proper software installed on your computer

We know that you need to access your documents in order to work everyday. Google Drive uses the same infrastructure as any other Google Apps services, which means it also has the same administrative tools, security and reliability, among others:

Centralized management: new tools are available in the Apps control interface for administrators to add or remove storage space for individual or groups of users

Security: encryption of data transfer between your browser and our servers, and check option 2 in time to prevent non-authorized access to an account by requiring users to log on returning secure code generated from their mobile phone

Data replication: synchronous replication of data in multiple data centers ensures the safety and accessibility of your records even in the unlikely event one of our data centers is temporarily unavailable

Availability: 99.9% uptime guarantee so you can be assured that your documents are accessible when you need it
Each user has access to Google Apps 5GB storage included in the suite Google Apps administrators can centrally manage and purchase additional storage space. When a user reaches the limit, administrators can purchase the necessary space of 20GB for $ 4 per month to 16TB (Google Docs are not counted in the quota of storage space).
Starting today, Google Apps administrators will see new orders for Drive in their management interface. Users of companies have opted for the quick launch, will enable Google Drive on drive.google.com / start and will receive their access in the following weeks.

Drive is designed to work harmoniously with all the products you use – whether Google products or third party service. You can share your photos on Google Drive + and will soon be able to attach documents directly into your emails Drive Gmail. Drive is intended to be an open platform, so we work with many third party developers, allowing you to do things such as sending faxes, edit videos and create models directly from Drive website. To install these applications, visit the Chrome Web Store and follow the events for more useful applications to come.
It is only the beginning of Google Drive, many developments are coming. Stay tuned!

If you needed any more proof that Google Drive was alive, look no further than this screenshot of the OS X 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.”

Though not definitive proof that the service will launch next week, it’s clear that this is a full, working app. I dug around a bit in the files and found that there is native support for Google filetypes like files produced in Gdraw and Google Docs.

The tipster pointed us to a Google.com URL to download a .DMG package. This app came directly from Google.

The news broke earlier today stating that Google was set to launch the much-rumored Google Drive service as early as next week. The service is said to offer 5GB of storage space although that is also an unconfirmed rumor.

At this point the app is pretty much useless. It seems Google needs to activate the service from their end in order to enable the functionality. But it’s just one more piece of the Google Drive puzzle.

Thanks for the tip, anonymous!

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.

That number jibes rather nicely with the leaked screenshots unearthed by the team at TalkAndroid just over two weeks ago. As expected, users will also be able to purchase additional storage should they need it, but there’s still no word on what kind of pricing model or storage tiers Google will run with. Those same images pointed to a Windows client for uploading files, and The Next Web reports that users can manage and store files in Google Drive via a folder on their desktop, though how exactly it will be set up is also still unclear.

With a Google Drive launch slated to take place any day now, the question now becomes whether or not Google can make an appreciable impact in the cloud storage space. Their most basic offering certainly looks better on paper than that of competitor Dropbox, who gives users 2GB of free storage just for signing up, but that’s only one of the plentiful players gunning for part of the cloud storage space.

As I noted last time, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have already staked out their claims with iCloud, Cloud Drive, and SkyDrive respectively. Meanwhile, established players like Box have begun paying more attention to certain market segments like enterprise as a way of keeping ahead of the competition. The cloud storage clash is just as heated on the mobile front, especially considering companies like HTC and Samsung have partnered with Dropbox to offer 25GB of extra storage to owners of a One series devices or Galaxy Tab 2.

Then again, Google is no stranger to shoving their heft where it arguably doesn’t need to be — just look at Google+. Considering how long Google Drive has been gestating deep in the dark womb that is Mountain View, I expect Google to take every possible opportunity to push their new storage offerings in our faces. But hey, if it works as we all hope it will, that may not be such a bad thing.

Update: We’ve managed to get our hands on the Google Drive OS X app, check out John’s post for more.

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 in an interview held this week at Box’s Silicon Valley headquarters (which you can watch in the video embedded above), Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said that while Google will no doubt make a splash with the launch of GDrive, he is not in panic mode about the impending arrival of a new big-name competitor. That’s because he’s confident that Box’s singular focus on cloud storage will continue to make it the top choice of many users, and particularly paying enterprise customers.

He explained the situation like this:

“We’ve seen the rumors about GDrive — for the past six years of running Box, we’ve been paying attention to Google and GDrive. And I think finally it’s about to come. We think it’s actually going to be a meaningful player in market. I wouldn’t discredit what it’s going to be able to do.

We’re very, very focused on the deep enterprise use cases of how do you manage information at scale, how do you get information from any device, whether it’s a Google-powered device or a Microsoft-powered device or an Apple-powered device. And so we think the enterprises are going to value platform-agnostic players that are very, very, very focused on security and the enterprise depth that we offer.”

This will by no means be Box’s first time competing with a major multi-billion dollar company. Box has counted Microsoft as a direct competitor for years (he’s been known to say that Box is “like SharePoint, if SharePoint actually worked.”) In general, Levie says, when going up against the tech industry’s Goliaths, Box can punch above its weight because it doesn’t have the distractions that larger companies have.

“We have exactly one motivation, and one goal inside of businesses, and that is to power the best sharing and collaboration and information management experience that there can be. And for Google, there’s a lot of different things they’re doing.

And so we think that our level of focus is going to be the huge competitive advantage that we have against any player in the space, whether it’s Google, or Microsoft, or Apple or IBM or anyone… they’re going to be competing with one company that is just entirely focused on this proposition.”

Of course, there was much more to discuss with Levie than just GDrive. Please watch our full interview above to see Levie discuss the launch last week of Box’s new OneCloud platform, why the iPad has changed everything when it comes to enterprise-level IT, how Box has been focused on mobile since the days when flip phones and SMS were as smart as cellphones got, the ongoing tech IPO wave (and Box’s own public offering prospects), and lots 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 during the week of April 16.

It seems like a smart move that would best Dropbox’s 2GB of free storage and put Google on even footing with Amazon’s Cloud Drive (Microsoft leads the pack with 25GB of free storage in SkyDrive.) Still, the leak raises a big question — who’s actually got the story right?

TalkAndroid’s source sent them another screenshot earlier in the week depicting the Google Drive Windows client in action, and it specifically points out that users have access to 2GB of free storage (though they can “always buy more,” a phrase which reappears in this latest leak). What’s more, the logo depicted in that older screenshot appears to be the same one spotted by GeekWire in February, but this newest screenshot uses a slightly tweaked version that drops the red in favor of green. Is this the sign of a clever fake, or a last-minute rebranding effort on Google’s part?

Meanwhile, Om Malik seemed awfully confident when he reported earlier this week that Google Drive is poised to launch at some point during the first week of April, with Google offering their users only 1GB of free storage. His sources seemed to confirm the notion that truly voracious users can purchase more cloud storage from Google, though Malik’s sources wouldn’t go details like pricing and storage tiers.

It’s obvious that Google Drive is coming, and coming soon, but Google’s going to be playing their last few cards as close to their collective chests as they can. Still, with April fast approaching, I suspect the full story will be unearthed sooner rather than later.

Update: TalkAndroid’s source says that the service will launch during the week of the 16th, not necessarily on that day. I’ve changed the headline to reflect this.

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.

The shot shows the web interface, which has a list view of files and a few buttons for management. The most interesting bit would be there in the lower left-hand corner, “Install Google Drive” — there will be client-side integration on the OS level, in all likelihood an enhanced folder a la Dropbox, or possibly a small syncing client like that used for Google Music.

Take a look:

There are two big red buttons, same as Google Docs. No drive space indicator, but that would probably be at the bottom of the screen. And it’s curious that some of the PDF files have Adobe icons, and some have blue document icons. Suspicious, but there are plenty of potential explanations. Missing too are the other buttons seen earlier, but in that shot a file was selected, which would bring up the share and trash options.

The Google Drive product is very clearly aimed at Dropbox — not that this is a surprise, but this screenshot, if real, hammers that point home. In fact, it appears to copy their product more or less exactly. Google will set it apart with a higher default storage capacity, true, but it’s definitely a classic Google replacement strategy.

If this little premature rollout is legit, we’ll probably see an official announcement in the next couple weeks. If it’s fake, well, we still expect an announcement soon, and it’ll probably look a lot like this.

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.

Currently, the full title of the search result reads “Writely – The Web Word Processor – test page for Platypus (GDrive)” and the URL is www.writely.com/BasePage.aspx. Of course, when you click through, the link takes you to an error page of sorts, with a message reading “Unknown action. Please check the URL and try again.”

It should be noted that the www.writely.com domain itself redirects to Google Docs.

Platypus, for those unaware, was the codename for GDrive used internally at Google until it was killed off in 2008. But recent findings have hinted that Google Drive is making a return. For example, in September, MG reported that code found in Chromium (the open source Web browser which serves as the testing ground for Google Chrome) referenced the non-public URL drive.google.com.

Later that month, a screenshot from a presentation at a Google-sponsored event showed something that looks very much like Google Drive, complete with text that even reads “My Google Drive.”

From MG’s earlier reports, the forthcoming service is essentially a rebranding of Google Docs with an accompanying desktop software component, similar to Dropbox. When exactly Google will finally launch Google Drive, after years of waiting, is still unknown. But at least we know they’re working on it.

Thanks Dan Behun

UPDATE: OK, well that test page has been around since 2006, it seems. Previously, it pointed to the Project page for Platypus (GDrive), but now it’s pointing to Google Docs. Nothing to see here, move along!

A better tip comes from Alex, who points out in the comments below, that going to drive.google.com will forward you to the https version of that site before giving a 105, rather than a 404. 

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.

As you can see in Wigand’s picture (above, with important elements circled by me), Google Drive on the web will essentially be Google Docs rebranded. This shouldn’t be a big surprise since Google has been positioning Docs as a sort of Google Drive since early 2010. The difference is that Google specifically didn’t want to call it that at the time. Now they do.

And it makes a lot more sense. Few people are using Google Docs for online storage beyond the files they use in Docs. Most still probably don’t even realize they can. Something as simple as changing the name to Google Drive should help with that. There will also be a new “My Google Drive” area for various folders in Google Drive. There will be other Drive-specific tools as well.

But here’s the real key: there will also be native syncing software that you install on your various computers and mobile devices. Yes, like Dropbox.

This was also true back in the day with GDrive, but again, the service (codenamed: Platypus) was said to be very buggy. Now it is said to work well. If you have a document on your computer that you want to move to another one, you simply drag and drop it into this new Google Drive sync app. Or, of course, you can use the web.

We haven’t heard the timetable for the Google Drive roll-out, but we imagine it will be fairly soon. Again, Google is using this internally right now and has been for some time. One thing that Google may be waiting for is Ice Cream Sandwich, the new version of Android due next month. There may be some built-in Google Drive component to it (though that’s just me speculating). And it seems that it will be at least a part of Chrome, and more importantly, Chrome OS.

Expect Google Drive to reside at drive.google.com (not live yet). It’s not clear how docs.google.com (the current home of Docs) will be used — perhaps as the home of the word processor app or maybe it will just redirect. Also not clear is how Google will allocate storage for this service, but presumably it will be the same as they currently do for Docs/Gmail/etc. You get a certain (ever-increasing) amount for free, and if you need more, you can buy it.

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.

At the time of my initial story last week, Google would only officially say that “The team is always testing out new features, but we don’t have any details to share at this time.” But others I’ve spoken with suggested there is definitely something here.

Google updated Google Docs in early 2010 to make it a bit more like a “Google Drive” by allowing users to upload any file. But the concept has never taken off because it’s clunky. My thinking is that Google is re-working this idea (probably using the exact same backend functionality — hence, the Google Docs message) to be a product more in line with the popular Dropbox or Box.net. And if that’s the case, I also assume that Android and Chrome (and especially Chrome OS) integration are key.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more about this soon.

[thanks Chris]

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.

End of story, right? Not so fast.

Something curious appeared this evening in the Chromium Code Reviews issue list. As first noted by Nick Semenkovich on Twitter, there was a ticket to add the URL drive.google.com to a list in the browser’s code. This URL (which is not yet live) lead to a Hacker News thread wondering: “Google Drive coming soon?“

Diving a bit deeper into the code reviews, what’s most striking is that drive.google.com doesn’t appear to be referenced anywhere besides this one exposed ticket. This suggests that it’s either no big deal, or that Google is keeping this very secret.

I don’t think it’s the former because the messaging in the one ticket indicates that drive.google.com has been added to the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) list alongside other key Google apps like docs.google.com and spreadsheets.google.com. Another bit of code puts it alongside Android Market and Google Analytics.

Google information security engineer, Chris Evans, completed the ticket this evening. And Chrome engineer Adam Langley approved it with the message “LGTM” (Looks Good To Me).

I reached out to Pichai (who again, is now a Google senior executive in charge of Chrome), but he declined to comment. A Google spokesperson would only say, “The team is always testing out new features, but we don’t have any details to share at this time.”

It sure seems like something is up. At the very least, Google does appear to be close to doing something with the drive.google.com domain. My best guess — which is pure speculation — is that it will be some sort of new Google app for syncing files over the web across a range of devices. PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, Android phones, iOS, you name it. Think: Dropbox.

But wait, doesn’t Google already offer cloud storage functionality as a part of Google Docs? Sort of. But since that functionality launched almost two years ago, it seems that very few people use it like they use Dropbox — hence, Dropbox’s $4 billion valuation and Box.net’s $550 million valuation.

Google is putting a lot of weight behind Chrome OS and Chromebooks. So far, it seems they haven’t exactly caught fire in the sales department. But they’re iterating fast, and one area of focus has been the file system (despite Pichai’s hope they wouldn’t need one — remember, they’re going after PC users here). One that is built into the core of the OS and tied to the cloud could be very useful to those hoping to switch from traditional PCs. That’s especially true now that Google is finally making their apps fully available offline as well, as they did with Gmail, Docs, etc, this morning.

More to come on this, I’m sure.

[image via Google Blogoscoped from way back in 2006]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).”
3. 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.
4. 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 least some information available to chew on. In all likelihood GDrive is only a matter of time.

One note on the leak: As we pointed out in a post earlier this week about the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets product, Google is going to focus on convincing small and medium sized businesses that their internal Office documents will be secure on Google’s servers. Google needs to control its own leaks if they hope to do this – this is the second major Platypus leak this year.

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.

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 implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc.

These slides were also made publicly available.

Greg Linden Discovers Google Drive; Google Purges Information

However, the slides discussing Google Drive were quickly taken down by Google and replaced with a sterilized version after entrepreneur and blogger Greg Linden noted the Google Drive information and blogged about it.

Greg did not retain a copy of the original, but readers of his blog did and posted the original content in the comments to Greg’s post.

What we Know

At this point, all we know is that Google is already developing Google Drive, an online storage service that will be designed to store all of our data and make it accessible from various devices. No word on pricing. As to timing, Google is concerned with storage and bandwidth constraints that exist today, and so this may still be far into the future.

Even so, the thought of Google entereing the market must give the online storage startup gang a shudder.

A final thought on Google Drive: Information was clearly purged from analyst materials (unless this is an elaborate hoax by Greg and his readers), meaning we have selective disclosure of this information. Some people received it but it is not generally available to the public. I don’t like this. In fact, I think it’s Gevil. Now that some people know about it, Google should put it (back) up on the web.