Google Drive to compete with Dropbox, Box and others

Google just announced its cloud storage service called Drive that offers 5 GB of free storage, mobile access (except iOS, but coming), and integration with Google Docs. Drive is the latest entry in a growing market of cloud storage providers.  My colleague Michael Porter recently posted a story about VMWare’s plans to create a private enterprise version of cloud storage.

Google Drive seems to be similar to many other services, but it does offer some nice extras such as a search feature.  You can search for your files using a variety of attributes (name, owner, etc) and even perform searches on images or scanned files.  Drive also recognizes 30 file formats, so you can view a Photoshop file without having Adobe Photoshop on your PC.  With its integration with Google Docs, you can upload files to Drive and then collaborate on them with others using Google Docs.

So, now there are cloud storage services from Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, DropBox, SugarSync, Amazon and others.  PCWorld put together the comparison chart shown here that summarizes the major features of each service.  

I’ve used every service listed except SkyDrive and now Google Drive.  I really like the integration of DropBox with apps on my iOS devices, but it would be better if I could sync any of my folders.  I like SugarSync because I can sync any folder on my Mac and I have 50 GB of free storage, but its not integrated with my mobile apps like DropBox.  Box is ok, but it lacks a good Mac client, so I don’t use it much. I’m going to give Google Drive a try when they come out with support for iOS devices.