Google's "GDrive" part of promise for infinite storage

GDrive

Greg Linden points to some slides from Google’s Analyst Day that were subsequently removed by Google, but the text of which Linden has relocated. Note that something called GDrive is mentioned, although Google clearly doesn’t see it as the entire solution.

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. As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine. Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access lis… [...TRUNCATED...]

ZDNet’s Garett Rogers comments:

The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.

In a Windows environment, most users know how to use the typical C: in “My Computer”. Network drives work exactly the same but are given a different letter and the files within are not stored on the computer. If my suspicions are correct and GDrive is simply a network share, most applications could take advantage of this service without modification.

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