Google Drive Landing as Early as Next Week, It's DOA with Only 1GB Free Storage

Another week, another Google Drive rumor. But this one is rather solid, Om Malik is saying that Google Drive is almost here and that it may even be landing in the first week of April, which would be next week.

Google Drive has gotten to mythical proportions, partly because there have been rumors about it for years now.

In fact, the project has already been killed off once only to have it resurface more recently, last year when Google started thinking more seriously about "me-too" products, case in point Google+, Google Music and so on.

Google Drive is almost here and by now we know pretty much all there is to know about it, save for the really interesting bits. It's going to be based on Google Docs, it's more of an evolution of what Docs already is.

There will be a desktop app, similar to Dropbox's which will make sure files on your computer stay in sync with files online.

The latest rumor fleshes out a few other details, but we'll have to wait and see how accurate they prove. For one, there will be a Google Apps version with domain restrictions, i.e. sharing only amongst colleagues.

There will also be an API for Google Drive from the get go, so this won't be another Google+ situation.

But the most interesting stuff in the latest rumor is the free space, it seems that Google Drive will come with 1GB of free storage, the same amount Gmail had almost a decade ago. Users will have to pay for anything above this mark.

UPDATE: Other reports say Drive will debut with 2 GB. Even so, the argument stands, it's a very small amount and, if anything, it shows that Google is just contnent copying Dropbox through and through. The report also said the service will launch the week of April 16.

If this proves to be accurate, it will mean that the company with the largest web infrastructure in the world, with one of the biggest if not the biggest and certainly the oldest clouds out there, hasn't managed to come up with a way, or a desire, to offer users more than it did a decade ago.

It will also mean that Google Drive is dead from the start, Dropbox comes with 2GB by default and most people have a lot more than that, via referrals for example. Dropbox uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service to store all the files, so it's clearly paying more than Google for it.

It may be that Google has been offering 1 GB of free storage during the testing phase, with Google employees, and will bump up the figure once the service debuts.