Google Drive Cloud Storage Revisited
Cloud storage -- it's pretty great. I mean, if someone had told us 30 years ago that there would be a way for us to store text (as data) in a place that both exists and doesn't, is secure, is permanent, and is easy to work with, we would probably have been a little confused.
"First of all, what is the 'internet?'" we'd ask, bemused.
To which, the time traveler would reply, "I don't even know."
Well, the strange thing is that the internet kind of is the cloud. It's not a bad analogy, really: like a cloud, the internet hangs above our day to day lives, ominous, faceless, omnipresent, omnipotent, and all-encompassing. Those last two may not be true of clouds, but they certainly are of the internet.
So, when I say that "the cloud" is secure, I mean its as safe as most places on the internet, which is not very. Cloud storage is only as secure as your password. But the same is true of your email, and you use that every day, if you're a normal human being. And you are.
But what if there was a cloud storage utility that was built right into your email account -- you know, the one you use every day? Well, that'd be nice. We should invent that. Oh someone did? Oh it was Google? Okay, never mind.
Google, as has been said before, has its fingers in many pies. Sometimes it dips its finger in a pie too early, and it recoils in horror, having scalded itself up to its knuckle. And that's kind of what happened with Google Drive.
We've already talked a bit about Dropbox in a previous article, and for good reason -- it's really, really good. But it doesn't build itself into your email account, and for a lot of people that's a problem.
Are you one of those people that really hates having multiple accounts for things? Do you hate it when you have to sign into three different things simultaneously just to write a document? Well, then Google may be the company for you. Unless you don't like it when companies know literally everything about you. If you don't like that, Google may not be the best choice.
But hey, at least they haven't done anything evil yet! (Don't murder us, Google!)
The point is, Google Drive is fantastic. You can do almost anything you can do with Microsoft Office with Google Drive. And Google Drive is free. It reads virtually every file format ever created, and it makes it possible to edit documents simultaneously with an unlimited number of people. That's pretty crazy future stuff!
But there may be some out there who don't like Google (can't imagine why! [don't murder us]), and for those people there is still Dropbox, Microsoft Office, and maybe a bit of complaining every once in a while.
Don't pity them. They're just like us, but different.