SkyDrive vs Google Docs

Recently, Google announced an update to their Google Docs solution which now allows you to upload any type of file, not just office documents. Many are calling this “GDrive” after the long-rumored service which is supposedly a cloud-based storage solution from Google.
Although the news got a lot of coverage from the blogosphere, few sites bothered to compare Google’s latest offering with SkyDrive, Microsoft’s service which has been around for a couple of years now.
SkyDrive wasn’t always the robust service it is today – over time, it has grown in both size and features. And it’s growing still with the upcoming launch of Office Web Applications (currently in beta).
SkyDrive Pluses
As of now, the SkyDrive service provides 25 GB of free online storage space in the cloud. Compare that to Google’s 1 GB. Anything over a GB and you have to pay. While that may be handy for those needing to grow a lot and are limited by the 25 GB from SkyDrive, most users will find 25 GB to be more than sufficient.
In addition, SkyDrive users have long since been able to upload different types of files to the service including things like PDFs, videos, MP3s, you name it. This is nothing new.
Another plus for SkyDrive is that it’s completely integrated with Windows Live Photos. In other words, when you add photos to SkyDrive, they’re in the Live Photos service and vice versa. It’s all the same thing. And it’s all accessible from one portal:home.live.com. Oddly though, with Google’s service, photos can be uploaded to Docs or they can be managed via Picasa, the services are separate but the storage used is not. For example, when I uploaded a photo to Google Docs it didn’t show up at Picasa Web Albums or the other way around. But the storage space Google offers for a fee is shared between Picasa and Docs (and Gmail)! So why wouldn’t the services be integrated through one portal or one centralized dashboard? Personally, I find that confusing.
Google Docs Pluses
Google Docs is largely known as an online office suite with collaboration features and at the moment, it’s one of the best out there. If you also use Google’s other products and services (like Gmail and the Chrome browser, for example), Docs is well-integrated with the company’s many offerings. Although Microsoft’s online office suite (still in beta testing) is extremely promising, Google has the more complete solution when it comes to online office utilities.
The collaboration capabilities of Docs are stellar, too. Plus, you can do things like real-time editing, share files and folders with others, hide files, search documents and templates, sort and filter your list of files and more. You can even import online data into your Google Spreadsheets.
In addition, because Microsoft’s web office suite hasn’t yet launched, Google Docs is the only service of the two that actually lets you go to one portal right now and simply create or upload a file from its easy-to-use interface.