The long awaited Google Drive made its debut this week amid a flow of commentary both pro and con for the product. In theory the product is late to the cloud party with rivals such as Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud among others firmly underway. Cloud-anything has been hot for some time now, and many Google users have eagerly awaited the ability to sync files between smartphone, tablet and computer.
Google’s motives for the product, believes some, go way beyond a cool product feature set. Mark Little, principal analyst at Ovum, for one, says “With Google Drive, Google has recognized the potential of shared cloud storage as a consumer hub or open platform that can be central to developing third-party apps such as video editing, sending faxes, and creating websites, with potential for a far greater range of applications from its busy community of third-party developers.”
Little thinks the platform potential of Google Drive is of strategic importance, leveraging “Google’s developer strengths and competitive pricing (50% cheaper than Apple’s iCloud in some cases) to drive penetration of its cloud offering via both consumer and enterprise channels.”
As with many of the cloud offerings, security and privacy are of concern to IT administrators tasked with maintaining compliance and content care. Earlier this year, Google announced a controversial consolidating of its privacy policies from more than 60 down to one main privacy policy. The policy took effect March 1, even as it was being contested by users, privacy advocates and countries (most notably France, which has very strict privacy requirements.)
Privacy advocates are trying to nail down just what Google can do with the content once users upload their content to Google Drive. The new privacy policy is making what Google does across its offerings and what is shared a bit muddy. There has been much talk about sensitive data and whether or not it should be uploaded to Google Drive at all.
Privacy is not a new problem for Google. Recently the FTC has undertaken an investigation into Google’s bypass of the default privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser for Google users. (The company contends that the change in default settings for Safari browsers were necessary to allow the “+1” button connected to its Google+ social network to work with Apple’s browser.) This current FTC investigation is happening just after Google was fined $25,000 for “allegedly blocking” a federal privacy investigation into a 2010 privacy breach.
Though Google is late to the cloud storage party, there is a twist to the offering. Observes Little, “Google Drive is a major challenge to Apple’s iCloud and others whose propositions are selling cloud storage as a useful ancillary to using its applications. The Google Drive proposition is the other way around, offering cloud storage as a core service from which users can access an ecosystem of highly useful applications.”
Google Drive will be even more powerful once the Apple iOS mobile operating system version becomes available, especially given Apple’s earnings release this week that showed ever-increasing demands for the products with 35.1 million iPhones and 11.8 million iPads sold during the company’s fiscal 2012 second quarter.
