Gdrive was killed in 2008 (according to Steven Levy's book In the Plex after some top management lobbying by Sundar Pichai .. the guy who now wrote the blogpost) but as this was 4 years ago and a lot of waves have passed since then, I suspect - without any internal knowledge - that this is a complete new iteration of the same topic.

I wonder how different this is from insync ( insynchq.com ) when it comes to syncing googledocs.

The main difference I can see is that insync creates MS file formats when it syncs (.xls, .doc etc) whilst GDrive creates .gsheet, .gdoc files which for me just open Google Docs in Chrome.

Interesting difference. Google's approach isn't very good for interoperability.

edit: and incidentally insync has failed to comprehend me moving a stack of files into a folder and instead created duplicates. Syncing is a hard problem with lots of edge cases (and on that note Chrome bookmark sync deleted 5 years of bookmarks)

Found an official answer[1]:

Is there continuity with previous Google Drive products?

Pichai: What Scott’s talking about, Google Drive as an evolution of Docs, is one thing. Early on, we had a project called Google Drive that was completely different.

What was different?

Pichai: There was a very traditional file system approach, a long time ago, having nothing to do with Google Docs. It was pre-mobile, pre-tablet, with deep integration into My Documents and Windows, et cetera. So it was very different.

[1] https://allthingsd.com/20120424/sundar-pichai-google-drive-i...

It's essentially a renamed Google Docs but allowing you to upload non-document files (although I think you might have been able to do that already)

Correct, you could already upload arbitrary files to Docs for a long time.

But it adds desktop apps, which are pretty important

This is a brand-new implementation. The old version was built on MacFuse. This one is a Python+wx.

wxwidgets? Dropbox is Python too.

It's likely something new. This is very much integrated into Google Docs (Docs actually gets replaced with Drive when you opt-in), so it's different than just a storage system. Like a commenter mentioned above, this is all about replacing your hard drive and the "Open With.../Save As..." dialogs in your operating system. The previous iterations of this were simply a generic filesystem interface to the shared storage pool Google was using for Picasa, Docs, Gmail, and other services. This is way better.

The fact that you have to ask (and that the question sounds credible) is a bad sign.

Why?

It is bad if they are launching a product from 2008, or launching a product that conceivably could have been done in 2008. If they were doing a dropbox clone they're four years behind, but as an above commenter mentioned, they aren't. I actually think this is a really good opportunity for Google to achieve their social ambitions. Rather than try to fight Facebook on their home turf Google can try to coalesce gmail/google plus/google docs/google drive into a kind of operating system replacement and build their social network around it, like a giant collaborative computing system. Time will tell though, superficially it looks like a lame google docs relaunch.