Will google drive succeed?
There has been lot of fuzz around the interwebs about the launch of google drive. Google is a late entrant into the online personal file syncing business while competitors like box.net and dropbox are well established and asserting dominance. Is it just another me-too product from google is it something that google values and cherishes?
Google has asserted in the past that the concept of files is dead and how it shuttered the near complete GDrive project which provided a tight integration between the local file system and online filesystem. What led google to change it’s minds about the file syncing market? As Sundar Pitchai points out, google drive is a natural evolution of google docs and collaboration being one of its key strengths.
By taking the concept of filesystem/drive to the App ecosystem, google is taking a bold step into a filesystem less future. Though it is counter intuitive, it enables a whole different class of applications that can be built apart from managing files. It lets you edit documents, presentations, diagrams and much more. All of it online and the user doesn’t have to care about where the files are stored as long as they can access them.
There are tons of apps in google chrome webstore which lets you open epubs, build mind mapping graphs, video editing(these are available only on the chrome webstore) and lot more. Sooner or later, there will be apps which cover most of the stuff we do, all online and google drive could be the center of all the data that’s being fed. It’s same as the promise of iCloud, except that iCloud is geared towards native apps than web apps.
Google drive is also important to google chrome os which forces the users to shuttle files between online apps back and forth due to a lack of a shared underlying file system. Now, google drive can act like the datasource(if the apps are integrated with google drive), people can create a document in one app and continue editing in another app seamlessly. Google executives have already confirmed that google drive will be merged into chrome os in later builds.
Let’s wait and watch how this plays out for google.
Update: Google drive arrives for chrome os in developer channel.