It's true, they're charging far more than they were yesterday, but yesterday you couldn't do with that space what you can do today (I hope that was clear).

Besides, it's still far cheaper than the main competition. Dropbox costs a good deal more.

It's really all about what you need to do. Google Drive won't be for everybody, that's for sure. It's best for people who want a lot of document collaboration with a Dropbox structure, because Dropbox doesn't have document editing built in.

I think the fact that Google Drive replaces Docs is very telling. It's basically an extended version of Docs with Dropbox functionality and ties into some of Google's other products (Picasa Web Albums, Google+, etc). If that's not your thing, there are other services out there. Have you looked into Flickr for your photo storage, for example?

However, to speak hypocritically for a second, I'm certainly glad that I can keep my old plan. I was paying $50/year for 200GB, and apparently as long as I keep up with those payments, I can keep it. Otherwise I'm looking at $120/year for the same thing but with monthly billing (I agree, they really need an annual option, even if there's no discount for it). If I eventually have to move up to the more expensive plan, though, it's not going to be the end of the world.

Anyway, I'm a pretty big fan of it already, but that should surprise nobody here. The launch of Drive actually got me to finish off a project I've been meaning to finish for a long time. I've been collecting PDF manuals for all the stuff in our house, and I'd started organizing them on Google Docs so I could share them with my wife and we wouldn't have to have the usual "drawer of manuals." I'd uploaded a bunch of them already, but I had about 40 of them that were still thrown into a folder awaiting renaming and uploading.

Now, the process has already been very easy. You could just drag and drop documents from Explorer into Docs in the browser, and you were done, but for some reason that was still enough of a barrier. Being able to drag and drop between explorer windows, however, made be sail through the process in no time. So yeah, I'm a believer (again, no surprise there, huh? ).