May 4, 2012 in Web Applications by Rajendra

Google Drive, do you use it?

After so many months of hype and secret leaks in the technology blogs and websites, Google Drive launched at last few days back. But does this service justified the anticipation it got? Well, NOT for me.

After waiting for few days to get the Drive enabled in my Google Apps Account. Today I finally installed it on my windows 7 machine. But I was surprised to find that it just created local desktop shortcuts in the corresponding folders to files on the Google Documents account on web.  The downloaded application just created new file types like “.gsheet”, or “.gdoc” and when you click on files to open them, it opens the corresponding file in your default browser using the Google Docs service.

The Google Drive service is being touted as a document and files synchronizing service. But to me this is not what I expected it to do. Suppose my internet is down or Google docs service is down due to any reason then I can not access the file I need. So where is the sync.

Also I tried adding a local excel workbook file in the Google Drive folder. It is uploaded automatically to the Google Docs. Fine. But then I am not able to edit it, only preview is available on clicking the file name. For editing the file I need to convert this to Google Docs. And then again this would not be synced to my local desktop.

I am not going to use it in its current format. Unless they change it to actually sync the files and allow editing the local files on web.

On the other hand Microsoft Skydrive provides all the missing features described above with whopping 25GB free space for old users. The files are synced physically i.e. you can access them on the web and on your local desktop also. And MS office format files are editable on web using Office 365 free service.