14 DAY TRIAL // Google is not the only one gearing up for a cloud storage service, it seems. Just ahead of Google Drive's launch, which is said to be in the next couple of weeks at most, Yandex, the Russian search engine, has launched Yandex.Disk, a cloud storage site with 10 GB of space offered for free.
"Launched" may not exactly be the best word to describe it, since the site is only available in Russian and is by invitation only. If you manage to navigate the site though, you should be receiving an invitation at some point.
There's an English version of the site listed as "coming soon" but there's no word on when that will be.
Your files will be accessible online, via the website, but there are desktop apps for Windows and Mac OS X. It's also available on iOS and Android. Without using any of the apps or the website, there's no telling whether the service will be any good, but it sounds competitive on paper.
Yandex is not the only search engine that's getting into the cloud storage business, Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, has recently done the same.
Google is looking more and more like the last one to the party. What's more, the 5 GB it's said to be offering for free don't look that appealing all of a sudden. Dropbox recently increased referral bonuses from 250 MB to 500 MB retroactively, so most users got a bump in their free storage quota.
Google does have the scale and the marketing prowess, but it's coming into a very crowded market and, unfortunately for the company, it's pretty much the last one arriving, as has been the norm recently, Google+ being the best example of that.