Google is adding some storage embellishments to its Docs service, essentially transforming the Web-based productivity suite into something akin to its long-rumored cloud storage service GDrive, though the company disputes that comparison.
“This is not the ‘GDrive’,” a Google (GOOG) spokesperson explained. “We’ve been continuing to expand on the types of files that can be uploaded to Docs. We started with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Later we enabled upload, view and share of PDFs. This launch builds on internal work that we’ve been doing for some time.”
And, indeed it does. Up until yesterday, Google Docs was limited to office-type documents. Today, those limits are gone and you can upload any file you like as long as it’s not over 250MB. The service will provide up to 1GB of free storage, with additional space costing $0.25 per GB per year.
How that’s different from this description of GDrive culled from a 2006 analyst presentation escapes me.
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
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