Branding Google Drive

Over the past two weeks, I have been preparing book #3 for publication. It's now out. This Google Docs for dummies alternative is available through my product website, and offers an easy way to get up to speed on Google Docs, Google's powerful online office suite. It also covers Google Drive's offline storage capabilities. However, as I explain in the book, the storage features aren't nearly as good as Dropbox.

One of the new sections in the book gets into the tricky issue of branding Google Drive. As old-school users know, it's been "Google Docs" for more than five years, but this year Google began changing the branding to "Google Drive". Instead of accessing Google Docs through docs.google.com, it's now drive.google.com. While "Google Drive" may be a good fit for the storage features (and helps it compete with Dropbox and iCloud), it does not represent the office suite (Google Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, etc.). However, I've noticed on a Google Apps help page that "Docs" is not completely going away:

When Google Drive first launches, the name of the service in the control panel will change from Docs to Drive and Docs.

However, in the consumer version of Google Docs, it's only branded "Google Drive". It's confusing for users. The only way to keep things sane is to refer to the office programs as "Google Docs" and the file/storage components as "Drive".