Is the GDrive Google's next big thing?

Is the GDrive Google's next big thing?
BorisVM	When Google launched Gmail on April Fools' Day of 2004, users were wowed by the unheard of 1GB mailbox limit. In a world of e-mail services that offered anywhere from 1MB to 10MB of storage, Google's offering stood out. For that and other reasons, Gmail invites soon became so highly coveted that they were selling on eBay for over US$30 each. Now a gigabyte inbox is de rigueur and just about everyone who wants one has a Gmail account. So what's next? It could be the GDrive. Rumored to be in the works for some time, GDrive would offer users unlimited storage space for just about any kind of document. Currently, a handful of applications exist that turn one's Gmail account into a virtual network drive. As functional as such utilities are, they are all hacks—not in the bad sense—and the tools' functionality can come and go depending on what changes or tweaks Google may make to Gmail. At an analyst presentation last week, Google's presentation (PDF) included some interesting information. In slide 19, titled "Consumer Products and Services," Google has an image of a bunch of files sitting in a warehouse captioned "store 100%." The notes attached to the since-removed PowerPoint file (what, no OpenOffice.org?) survive in the cache of one interested reader and give some insights into what may be the search company's next big play. In the original presentation, Google discussed its vision for "a world of infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power" and its desire to "house all user files," making them accessible from anywhere. Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user. Over the past year or so, Google rumormongering has become nearly as popular as reading Apple's tea leaves. Late in January people were wondering if the search giant was about to make a play for Napster, a rumor that was quickly debunked by the company. Is the GDrive plausible? Recent moves by the company point in that direction. In October 2005, Google showed off Google Base, a searchable database of whatever you wanted to put into it. More recently, the company briefly lifted the curtains on Google Page Creator, a web application that provided a WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool for pages that would then be accessible at googleaccount.googlepages.com. An online storage solution—perhaps similar to .Mac's WebDAV tool—is a natural evolution for a company that wants to know all about your information. Do you trust Google with all of your data? Google believes you will, and will try to earn your trust by making sure that the data you entrust to its storage service is "more secure than it would be on your own machine." Google even sees the data on your PC ultimately serving as a local cache, with the master stored on its servers. Personally, I'd rather not entrust my files and data to a third-party service, no matter how benign. Plus, GDrive will have to compete with current online storage services that provide a finite amount of storage, such as iDrive and FreeDrive. But with Google's mostly squeaky-clean image (which has been tarnished a bit recently), GDrive could prove very popular for users with a good broadband connection and a desire for an off-site backup of their data.
achtung_panzer	There's no such thing as overexposure. Izgleda nekoj ne mozhe da prestane da go gleda Google kako nov Microsoft. Google prvin kje izlegol so sopstven OS i kompjuter (demantirano), pa gjoamiti-Ajax aplikaciite na gmail i googlemaps (kajshto patem recheno fali "X" od Ajax iako bezmalku site Ajax tutoriali na net gi posochuvaat niv kako primeri)), pa kje go kupuvale Napster (demantirano)... A publicitetot nikogash ne shteti I najobichniot korisnik go sfakja rizikot od skladiranje na podatocite na tugja mashina nad koja toj/taa nema nikakva kontrola. Osven toa, konceptot na online storage i thin client- thick server se kosi so zakonot za dvojno zgolemuvanje na performansite za smetka na dvojno namaluvanje na cenata sekoja godina. A toj zakon vazhi ushte od "damneshnite" denovi na prviot pentium... Ednostavno Google go nema toj kapacitet da stane Microsoft, kolku i da sakaat nekoi da go gledaat taka. Osven tehnologijata na prebaruvanje, od Google ne izlegle so bilo kakov drug tehnoloshki novitet. Na toa pole barem, se znae koj kosi koj voda nosi...