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March 6, 2006

Google Drive: What we know so far

Michael Arrington

97 comments »

We have all the ingredients for a great story: dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors.

Here’s what we know so far:

Epic 2015 - Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives

In the spring of 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson presented the ominous Epic 2014 (now renamed Epic 2015) that ultimately predicts that Google will force the New York Times to shut down. In the movie, they also predict that Google will launch something called “Google Grid”: “…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.” See the movie here.

Google Drive Discussion with Analysts

Robin and Matt’s Google Grid prediction seems to be well on its way to becoming reality. On March 2, 2006 (a few days ago), Google hosted an analyst day and presented a wide range of information on new products and strategies. Among the information was a description of the upcoming “Google Drive”, a place for users to store 100% of their data online.

On page 19 of the presentation, Google stated the following:

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.

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 list), etc.

These slides were also made publicly available.

Greg Linden Discovers Google Drive; Google Purges Information

However, the slides discussing Google Drive were quickly taken down by Google and replaced with a sterilized version after entrepreneur and blogger Greg Linden noted the Google Drive information and blogged about it.

Greg did not retain a copy of the original, but readers of his blog did and posted the original content in the comments to Greg’s post.

What we Know

At this point, all we know is that Google is already developing Google Drive, an online storage service that will be designed to store all of our data and make it accessible from various devices. No word on pricing. As to timing, Google is concerned with storage and bandwidth constraints that exist today, and so this may still be far into the future.

Even so, the thought of Google entereing the market must give the online storage startup gang a shudder.

A final thought on Google Drive: Information was clearly purged from analyst materials (unless this is an elaborate hoax by Greg and his readers), meaning we have selective disclosure of this information. Some people received it but it is not generally available to the public. I don’t like this. In fact, I think it’s Gevil. Now that some people know about it, Google should put it (back) up on the web.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Aaron

    March 6th, 2006 at 8:01 pm

    I guess this will continue to be the theme of my week :) Here’s our response:

    http://blog.box.net/?p=21

  2. Eric Willis

    March 6th, 2006 at 8:24 pm

    Hmm…yet another product release by Google. I wonder if I will be as stellar as Google Base or Google Talk. There is a difference between diversifying ,”letting a thousand flowers bloom”, etc and trying to be everything for everyone. I’ve never seen a company become so unfocused. It is impossible to do EVERYTHING well. No company has ever done it…Google will be no different…much less tried to enter so many markets within a short period of time.

    Maybe google needs to produce a more concentrated Mantra other than “organizing the world’s information”. This is a company that is riding the wave of it’s dominant search engine;however, has failed to impress outside of its Gmail release. Google seems to be struggling with managing the innovation process(case in point the big boo boo with their Desktop Application that you just profiled). Again there is a different between innovating and “creating value”. God forbid someone creates an engine an order of magnitude better than Google Search and operates on an action based system and not click based. We would see an implosion. I think Google needs to focus on innovating in search and solving that monster of “click fraud”…which is the biggest “evil” in the advertising industry right now and google is the major profiteer.

  3. Aditya Mukherjee

    March 6th, 2006 at 8:28 pm

    I don’t know if this is a valid argument or not … but the major problem I see with storing your data online, and treating ones local copy as a mere ‘cache’ of the data is the constant uploading and downloading of the data.

    How, for example do you store a 4GB videogame, and play it off the fly, unless we have broadband speeds of 1GBps which effectively will give around 500KBps?

    Not to mention that that movie is a serious MS and NYT basher! :P But hey, I’m sure two Stanford graduates know what they’re doing! :)

    Go Google! :D

  4. jammo

    March 6th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    WOW!
    amazing movie! “Epic 2015 - Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives”

    i was spell-bound the entire time.
    these are indeed some amazingly wonderful times we live in & i love it.
    seems kinda of scary though.
    i have an issue with my privacy, yet i spend almost all my free time online. but i still wont trust Google nor anyother provider with my personal data.

  5. Liam @ Web 2.5 Blog

    March 6th, 2006 at 9:21 pm

    They have it exactly backwards. What you want is a 20g flash drive for always-on-you data (eventually wireless, e.g. UWB), with an online subset that you’ve published for (semi-)public viewing and mash-ups.

    Wireless flash drives will always be faster and more reliable than any WAN-based service. Use the net to sync shared content on them with others.

    I call the always-on-you web that emerges from this technology “Web 2.5″.

    Heavy users would also need auto-archiving of older stuff; user-encrypted and housed at more than one service provider (who has no visibility into the data due to encryption).

  6. Dave McClure

    March 6th, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    you know, it’s kind of ridiculous that my Gevil t-shirt gets more press than i do… ;)

    seriously tho, is this really that much of a conspiracy? isn’t this sort of obvious direction for google to head towards?

    i guess the real question is not whether / when they offer (close to) unlimited storage, but rather what kind of features & APIs go along with it.

    i fully expect that all the majors (Goog, Yahoo, Msn) will eventually offer some form of hosted mass storage.

    (and in fact they do this today… it’s called ‘email’ ;)

    - dave ‘i’m not Gevil but my shirt is’ mcclure
    http://www.SimplyHired.com

  7. Chris Jara

    March 6th, 2006 at 10:20 pm

    In response to Aditya and Liam, it sounds like the short term plans for Google is to store text-centric files and not the contents of your entire hard drive.

    I’d have to think they want to stay away from the copyright issues of storing potentially infringing data.

  8. Michael Arrington

    March 6th, 2006 at 10:26 pm

    Dave McClure, I just bought a gevil tshirt and coffee mug from the cafepress store. It should be here in a week. :-)

  9. Lidor Wyssocky

    March 6th, 2006 at 11:21 pm

    Let’s consider the some forces that can influence a user’s decision regarding using a service such as GDrive:

    1. Storage prices are getting lower all the time.
    2. Collaboration tools which can be hosted in a secure environment are available (for business users)
    3. The amount of data I can carry with me where ever I go is also getting larger.
    4. I don’t really need all my stuff accessible from any location all the time.
    5. I do care about my privacy (to some extent)

    In short, I can’t see why (most) users would find such an idea appealing. If some business really needs a collaboration environment, it will probably have a dedicated self-hosted server for that, enabling pretty much the same idea. Personal users might find this idea appealing, but many of them would lean toward carrying data on them.

    BTW, how many of you gave up their “regular” mail box when signing up yo Gmail…?

  10. Kashif Aziz

    March 7th, 2006 at 10:37 am

    Google is going to invade our households, and us, eventually. Google is going to be The Government. Period. ;)

  11. Derrick

    March 7th, 2006 at 11:18 am

    I put up the rest of the slide comments since many people were curious

  12. Derrick

    March 7th, 2006 at 11:19 am

    Here is the link:

    http://absolutevalue.blogspot.com

  13. Observer

    March 7th, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    Just a few observations.

    First, are the owners of the pipes going on vacation between now and 2015 (if ever)? Last I read, AT&T is just getting started. I doubt Comcast will allow itself to get rolled over without a fight.

    Second, utilities are just getting into broadband. They can cut their broadband prices to the bone and still stay afloat via their regulated arms.

    Third, the muni WIFI/WIMAX effort will further fragment the ownership of the pipes.

    Fourth, are countries such as China going to hand over the keys to their sovereignty? Who really controls the pipes and servers in China? Yahoo may own the servers in China, but, the equipment is still located in China (for a reason). What about European Commission and Microsoft? Do companies really have the ability to trump entire countries?

    Fourth, the term “dependency” for the Googles of the world has just taken center stage and may well be redefined via usage fees from the owners of the pipes. Perhaps the more appropriate term in this context is “tariff”.

    In the final analysis, who really owns the marbles in the school yard? :-)

  14. Ping

    March 7th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

    I am more and more afraid of Google….

  15. paul

    March 7th, 2006 at 5:14 pm

    thanks for the link to Epic 2015. It is expertly produced and quite thought provoking.

  16. Saul Weiner

    March 7th, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    Google seem to be slipping of late. lots of public gaffes. maybe they’ve grown way too quickly andn can’t catch their feet?

  17. Akram

    March 8th, 2006 at 1:39 am

    looks like Google Grid will eventually turn into “The Matrix” the evil AI from the Movie…

  18. Jean-Marie Le Ray

    March 10th, 2006 at 12:57 am

    Hi,

    All the presentation restored here with slides and comments: http://adscriptum.blogspot.com.....positive_2
    Best regards,
    Jean-Marie Le Ray

  19. Frog29

    March 10th, 2006 at 6:39 pm

    There is now a link to the actual powerpoint here http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002797.html

    ( I found it through a comment on Greg’s site)

  20. Mikes

    March 20th, 2006 at 10:38 am

    There are certain services such as online storage that are too specialized for someone like Google to master. The best in the field is IBackup (http://www.ibackup.com).With its suite of online storage offerings that include IDrive, WebFolders, IDrive for Mac, IDrive ASP, IDrive Multimedia, it will be impossible for google to match the breadth of IBackup online storage services.

  21. Brent

    April 6th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

    Good lord Mike - you can’t be serious. Perhaps you trying to just tease us with your comment ;-) Google pretty well has unlimited resources at this point. They have the brain techs, the staff, the cash, and the gumption to pull this off.

    I love Google’s new video search engine now in beta. This will be a huge pig on resources and from what I’ve read, they will be growing massive drive space.

    Maybe you are just endorsing a product…say it’s not so!

  22. Shii

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:07 am

    Am I the only person who thought Epic 2015 was the most retarded thing ever? All it says is “GOOGLEZON WILL BATTLE THE NEW YORK TIMES TO THE DEATH. IT WILL BE EPIC.” It doesn’t even make sense.

  23. doxycycline

    May 4th, 2006 at 1:41 am

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  24. CBrown

    July 14th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

    You should also check out Data Deposit Box for online data backup. It’s inexpensive and very easy to use. It takes about 2 minutes to install the online backup agent. Once installed it’s fully automatic with nothing to remember and no procedures to follow. You can access your online data storage easily with a web browser.

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  26. Ibod Maske

    October 23rd, 2006 at 2:24 am

    In response to Aditya and Liam too .
    Google is going to be The Government. Period.

  27. Guido

    November 16th, 2006 at 5:40 pm

    Last week i saw a good article, google and amazon can form the “GOOGZILLA” of the web…. a monopole will be born….

  28. Froehlich Jiraporn

    November 22nd, 2006 at 6:03 am

    a very good information site, best greads from germany!

  29. RCPROFIT

    December 9th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    Flash, Poof, Magic!

  30. Karaoke Kev

    January 3rd, 2007 at 8:17 am

    A good summary. As one who has tried Google drive I can recommend the product - it is large, fast, safe and secure (I think secure anyway). I would not recommend storing any hugely confidential information on it just in case!

    Karaoke Kev
    http://youtubekaraoke.blogspot.com

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