14 DAY TRIAL // There are clear signs that Google is working on something dubbed Google Drive. The first clues showed up a couple of weeks ago and, now, there are more, but there is also better indication of what Google Drive may be, not a new product, but, rather, simply a rebranded Google Docs document list.
As the Google Operating System blog found, many of the things relating to Google Drive, discovered in Google Docs source code, have to do with the documents list, aka the Google Docs homepage.
While Google Docs started out as an online office suite with collaboration features, Google eventually enabled any-file uploads.
Users can now store any file, document or not, in the Google cloud. Granted, 1 GB of storage means that Docs is no more than a simple backup or sharing tool, but the possibility is there.
Yet, despite becoming a universal cloud file locker, it's still called Google Docs. That may change though, the cloud storage part of the service may be rebranded Google Drive, while the document editors and the native files will continue to be called Docs.
This should alleviate a lot of the confusion around the product and also make it a lot clearer to users that may not be familiar with it that they can store any file in the Google cloud.
That said, apart from the rebranding which seems likely at this point, there's no way to know if Google actually plans to change or improve the service in any way.
More free storage, 1 GB is a paltry figure, would be nice. Of course, the big prize would be a desktop and mobile app with file sync. Google has been reluctant in creating desktop apps, but it could create something that runs inside Chrome, as a background app. The possibilities are there, Google just has to want to do it and it hasn't so far.