Microsoft, Dropbox gear up for Google Drive onslaught

The cloud storage concept isn’t new, in fact it’s been for several years but it’s now that Google has launched their Google Drive service that masses are actually being introduced to the idea. Microsoft and Dropbox are two of the big, popular names in the space and they’ve had the service for a while. Google Drive was only just launched last night with 5GB of free space and it won’t be surprising to see almost the entire Google userbase using it in the next few days and weeks to come. It’s likely that the popularity will far exceed that of Dropbox and Microsoft’s Skydrive. Microsoft and Dropbox are both gearing up their services to compete with Google’s new service.

A threat to existing cloud storage services

Microsoft has just launched software for Windows and OS X, the apps for iOS and Windows Phone devices were updated too, just days before the official Google Drive launch. Many of us were expecting the Google Drive service to launch on Tuesday. Dropbox added a feature, which allowed users to publicly share their data using a URL. Skydrive and Dropbox have had an advantage over Google in terms of the amount of storage space. For example, Microsoft’s Skydrive offers its users 25GB of free space and Dropbox has been running promotions lately, where users can get upto 16GB of free space by asking their friends to register for the service.

Google Drive only offers 5GB of space for free, although you can pay them $4.99 (approximately Rs. 250) a month and get 25GB of space. In addition to the 5GB free Google Drive space, free user accounts get their Gmail space to 10GB and Picasa to 1GB. If you buy a paid account, your Gmail account capacity gets bumped up to 25GB. Google has a host of web apps that can use the Google Drive, so they’re likely to have more leverage than the other services. Google also has released a Google Drive SDK for web applications, which means other services can use Google Drive as a storage as well.