14 DAY TRIAL // Google has finally made the move plenty have been awaiting for years now, it has come up with its own cloud storage service. Unfortunately, some people's expectations may have been higher than what Google actually delivered, but it's still a pretty big announcement from the company. Google now says that users will soon be able to upload any type of files to Docs, something hinted at several months ago.
"We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection," Vijay Bangaru, product manager, Google Docs writes.
"[Y]ou can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations)."
It's as straightforward as it gets. Users will be able to upload any file and share it with their friends or colleagues just like they would any Google Docs file. The new 250 MB file size limit is also a very welcome upgrade. The use cases for the new functionality, though, are somewhat limited due to the 1GB free storage space limit.
Granted, regular users aren't likely to need more than what they would use the space for, an alternative to USB drives, as Google exemplifies. And additional storage space is now cheaper than ever after the company dropped the prices to as low as $0.25 per gigabyte, 20GB are just $5 per year. Still, for a company which introduced the 1GB inbox for Gmail six years ago and which has since upgraded it to well over 7GB, it does seem very limiting. When you factor in that Miscrosoft's universal cloud storage service Skydrive comes with 25GB of free storage, things start to look even worse.
Incidentally, Picasa users also get only 1GB of storage space, which won't be shared with Google Docs, by the way. Which is the feature's second biggest flaw. The storage space for Docs is separated from Picasa, from Gmail and all other Google services for that matter, meaning that users won't have all of their files in one place, easily available and searchable. Still, this is the first step, as the service evolves and Google Chrome OS, which will most likely take advantage of the cloud storage, the unified GDrive may become a reality.