Google Drive

I am pro-cloud.

I want my documents and pictures and photos and music whizzing around above my head like Mike Teavee where I can grab them down.

I don’t want a phone full of stuff that disappear forever when I upgrade. I don’t want a laptop full of files that fizzle when I spill a water bottle on them. I don’t want a box of CDs that I lose in my next reorganization or a box of ZIP disks that die off the next time technology upgrades.

Okay so I am maybe not always great with all of my stuff all of the time. Who asked you to judge anyway. The cloud, is the point. 

There’s definitely a loss of control. To whom am I blithely giving my stuff? In making it accessible to me anywhere, to whom am I making it accessible? You can get a bit end-of-days about it. Or, to be more mundane, a bit overly-personalized-advertising about it. Or a bit once-they-have-me-how-much-will-they-charge. Or a bit what-happens-when-their-security-is-breached.

But ease and access are a tradeoff that we all always make. Risk and privacy on one hand, convenience on the other.

And Google’s killer app has always been search. They want you to stop thinking of them as a search-engine company, but they’ll always be a search company. Their stock in trade is wizardry, magicianship.

I don’t want to search the internet. I don’t want to label or file a zillion photos or songs or documents or contacts or emails. I just want to get what I want, wherever, whenever. I want the right stuff to appear. And that is Google’s gift.

Which is all to introduce why Google Drive is cool. But how cool? Lots of people are trying to decide. So far, I’m not sure.

I use DropBox a little, but Google Docs incessantly – and my only problem has been, no connectivity, no Docs. Until now. And that’s huge.

What will disappoint Google about me is that I still see this as having genre limits. My music is in iTunes and my photos are in iPhoto. I don’t see that changing, because they’re seamless my devices: they get me what I want, where I want, when I want. So Google Drive, for me, is going to continue being primarily for documents – and I don’t know if that was their goal.