It’s a big day for the cloud, isn’t it? Microsoft, only this morning, released a preview for their Dropbox-style desktop clients for SkyDrive, while also (disappointingly) cutting out 18GB of data for new users, leaving you with only 7GB of free space. It’s still competitive, but sadly it shows that the 25GB was only for show with the previously web-only interface.
Meanwhile, in camp Google, it appears that their big day has arrived, with Drive beginning to roll out. As you can see in the image to the right, that’s my old Google Docs account and it currently has 5GB compared to the previous 1GB. My regular account is also up from around 82GB to 87GB (with $20 of paid storage). While the branding hasn’t changed yet, this is certainely a sign that Google Drive is about to drop. It’s a little sad to see that the company that was once the king of storage with the, at the time, massive 1GB with every Gmail account, is now only offering 5GB free, but I’m quietly hopeful that, if Google Storage remains at the same price as it is right now, it will be very competitive in dirt-cheap storage.
As well as the image that I’ve seen first-hand, Reuters is also saying that the release date is today (to tomorrow for Australian’s) and that you will be able to get up to 100GB of paid storage, which is also a little weird considering Google Storage can go all the way up to 1TB for US$256 a year or even 16TB for US$4096 a year.
All will be revealed, if rumours and also the current bump in Google Docs storage is to be believed, very, very soon. And we’ll have it all here on techgeek.com.au.