It only took Google six or so years to get its long anticipated GDrive cloud storage service out the door and into general circulation, but it finally did happen on April 24.

A leaked screenshot of Google Drive for Windows, the forthcoming GDrive cloud storage service, will come with 5GB free storage with the option to “upgrade with more space at any time”.

Look for a new metric to become a quarterly staple of blogs as they begin reporting on which Cloud service as gained/lost the most users in the not to distant future.

In a blog post, Google poked fun at itself for taking so long, likening Google Drive’s announcement to the sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

Thumbing
through the eWEEK archives, the earliest story we found was one
published on March 6, 2006 by staff writer Ben Charny entitled "Google Continues Drive for Unlimited Storage," which talks about the mysterious project that had been up and running
internally for a while.

Previous rumors held that Google Drive, or GDrive, would provide users with a single gigabyte of space, but the larger offering would put Google Drive more on par with cloud storage competitors.

What GDrive Offers

For the record, a GDrive subscription offers the first 5GB of storage for free, which is not a heck of a lot
these days.

The long rumored Google Drive, or GDrive, service has once again popped up on radar, this time courtesy of a report claiming the online storage service will be launched as soon as next week.

When
users upgrade to a paid account, their Gmail account storage also will
expand to 25GB.

Since other competitors also offer users 5 GB of free storage to get started, that may not be Google’s biggest selling point.

For example, a user can attach photos from
GDrive to posts in Google+; in the near future, the company said, they
will be able to attach files from Drive directly to emails in Gmail.

Unlike other file service remote desktop services, users must uploadeither manually or automaticallyfiles to the GDrive cloud to have access to them; it doesnt sound like the service will allow for direct access to files on the Computer, but thats not clear all together at this time.

As businesses want to scale, that’s our entire business, to offer a more scalable, open platform.

In the past, it was believed that Google would launch the GDrive branded service with 2 GB of free storage, but a recent leaked screenshot obtained by Talk Android shows that the service will launch with 5 GB from the start and that users can purchase and add additional storage space at any time.

And Google Plus social networking site was updated to allow users to automatically upload photos captured on their smartphones to the cloud, and automatically uploaded images are stored without any storage caps.

Many Competitors Have a Big Head Start

There are already dozens — make that hundreds — of cloud storage
providers available to handle your files in a safe place.

Give the lack of interoperability between the cloud storage platforms, it will be hard for it to get a big flock of new users.

Syncdocs takes full advantage of Googles reliable, fast online storage – keeping Computer folders synchronized with Google Docs and with other users.

Saroo Buffett is a business journalist based in Mumbai, India. Saroo has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Saroo spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.