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April 20, 2006

Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive

Michael Arrington

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Microsoft is building an online storage service, code named Live Drive, says Ray Ozzie in an interview with Fortune:

Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information - movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever - could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Ray also mentioned web storage in an executive staff memo published by Dave Winer last October. See “Seamless OS” under “The Opportunities”.

I am banging down every door I know at Microsoft to get more information on this, but I don’t expect further comments. From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously).

If Microsoft pushes this, they’ll be first. More on this story from Mary Jo Foley.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 10:34 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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  1. 谷歌一下

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:19 am

  2. jasonkolb.com

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:28 am

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  4. Simple Rules Media Solutions Weblog » Blog Archive » Microsoft Live Drive

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  5. Dave’s Wordpress Blog

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  6. » Microsoft planeja lançar drive online

    April 21st, 2006 at 7:49 am

  7. Digital Drops » O Microsoft Live pode ser lançado antes do Google Drive

    April 21st, 2006 at 8:05 am

  8. Anonymous

    April 21st, 2006 at 1:28 pm

  9. tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog » links for 2006-04-21

    April 21st, 2006 at 3:25 pm

  10. Brewed Fresh Daily » Blog Archive » TechCrunch: Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive

    April 22nd, 2006 at 4:31 am

  11. macasia.com

    April 22nd, 2006 at 4:37 am

  12. » Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive

    April 22nd, 2006 at 7:19 am

  13. Das CIO Weblog

    April 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 am

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    April 22nd, 2006 at 1:21 pm

  15. Geeky Info » Blog Archive » Microsoft live drive

    May 19th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

  16. Because I Write » Blog Archive » Digital Assets Management

    June 21st, 2006 at 9:37 pm

  17. one man army’s blog » Blog Archive » Exclusive Screenshots of Omnidrive

    July 25th, 2006 at 3:13 am

  18. T. Longren

    July 25th, 2006 at 5:15 am

  19. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Omnidriveのスクリーショット、独占掲載

    July 25th, 2006 at 7:36 am

  20. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Windows Live Drive Info: Quickly Deleted Post From Team Member

    August 16th, 2006 at 6:17 pm

  21. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Windows Live Drive情報: チームメンバーのブログから速攻で記事削除

    August 17th, 2006 at 9:20 am

  22. Tech Industry » Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive

    September 10th, 2006 at 1:57 am

  23. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 比較記事：オンラインストレージ企業

    September 10th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

  24. Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Future of Online Storage, 40 points to think about

    September 13th, 2006 at 5:45 am

  25. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Another GDrive “Platypus” Leak

    October 13th, 2006 at 7:45 pm

  26. Freakitude Technology Blog / Is GDrive Google’s Next Big Thing ?

    October 14th, 2006 at 5:23 am

  27. Time For More Live Drive Online Storage Rumors

    May 12th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

  28. TechCrunch en français » Mais qu'est donc devenu Gdrive?

    August 21st, 2007 at 9:50 am

Comments

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  1. Na'im Merchant

    April 20th, 2006 at 10:50 pm

    How is this different from .Mac iDisk… just curious b/c this was mentioned as a first…

    Na’im

  2. Keith Dsouza

    April 20th, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    It does not matter now who comes out first, all that matters now is who is better.

    Let the two giants fight it out, afterall its we who are gonna benefit.

    I have already postponed my plan to buy a additional hard drive for my computer.

  3. Jonas

    April 21st, 2006 at 12:12 am

    Expect this live drive functionality to be prominently featured on with vista… I expect it to be featured on both the live page (of course) andas some kind of icon on the desktop. Seamless backup! What a relief.

    Better still - how will the millions of new pc owners transfer their data from their existing computers to their new vista machines?

    As for business models… how bout an insurance model… free unlimited upload - free limited download. Complete download and accessibility for a monthly fee.

    Sheesh, the ease of transfering data to a new computer will be worth the price.
    They could snag a serious # of customers with this feature alone. Once transferred, offer those who did back up - the peace of mind… count on high subscription retention numbers.

    Welcome to the era of “thin plus” computing.

  4. Bart Claeys

    April 21st, 2006 at 12:28 am

    Gdrive, Live Drive, whatever. Sounds nice but not for customers with a limited upload capacity. The upstream speed and capacity is very limited with most ISPs here in Belgium. As an example my upload capacity is limited to 1GB/month at 192Kbps and I pay around $50/month for that :(

  5. Jon

    April 21st, 2006 at 12:44 am

    “Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive”

    … and iDisk/.mac launched before either of them…

  6. Cordula

    April 21st, 2006 at 12:45 am

    For Microsoft it does matter to be first, because they have been trailing Google in key online offerings for a long time.
    I also expect Live Drive to be closely integrated with Vista, but I don’t think, that’s positive. It’s another try to make the desktop more important than it deserves to be.

  7. Keith Dsouza

    April 21st, 2006 at 1:03 am

    With the hiccups they have already had with the Vista launch, Microsoft should be on target this time well already they have a lot of unhappy people out there.

    Anyways most of microsoft new releases have been already out there in the market for long long time, take a look at IE7 they took 6 years to upgrade from IE6.

  8. J

    April 21st, 2006 at 3:28 am

    Most essential is a really really good working upload/download protocol, that can get along with such simple things is DSL disconnects.

    Or to shutdown the notebook when leaving the office to resume upload/download later?

    Upload/download must live up to P2P protocol reliability. Otherwise, what is unlimited space good for, if upload does not work?

  9. Jon Gales

    April 21st, 2006 at 4:40 am

    I would expect Palm to sue if this product really does launch as Life Drive. Palm has a handheld with the same name (and goals–to store your media files).

  10. pacificdave

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:06 am

    and in other news. since this is the best web 2.0 report site out there… everyone should tune to http://www.thinkfree.com come April 24. just got an email from them stating:

    “Starting April 24 we are going to provide you with a whole new experience.”

    “What’s New
    - 1 GB free storage!
    - We now have a lightweight front-end so that you can get working quickly in Preview or
    Quick Edit modes while preserving more full developed features in the Power Edit mode.
    - Collaboration: sharing, tagging, commenting, publishing, full text search of documents
    in your own folders and shared folders.
    - Version management: view document history including changes, comments, and tags
    added over time.”

    seems like it’ll be pretty damn kewl…

  11. Saul Weiner

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:35 am

    I was recently chatting with some folks who create adwords based web2.0 apps and they said that MSFT is going all out to attract advertisers through adcenter. While Google is the main honcho, MSFT obviously feels that with its expanding adcenter service (which I was told is making some headway, even though it’s still small) will grow large enough to support this model. I can’t imagine MSFT charging for this service.

  12. Jeff Dalton

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:18 am

    I wrote a pretty detailed post on this topic two days ago:

    Live Drive and GDrive, The Ferraris of cluster-based storage services on the information superhighway

    It’s not just GDrive and Live Drive. Other companies like Amazon (S3) and IBM (On Demand), and HP (Infrastructure-on-Tap) have similar products already in the marketplace for developers and businesses.

    The key differentiators I believe will be price: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will make these services affordable (free or near free). It will be interesting to see if this service can be supported in an advertising supported model. Obviously, Microsoft (Ozzie) thinks it can work.

  13. Spiros Theodossiou

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:47 am

    I expect to see Google and MSFT and Yahoo offering subscription based access to “office” type applications accessed via these storage portals (both for individuals and SMB’s). will be interesting to see what happens in the outsourced hosting SMB space.

  14. Peter

    April 21st, 2006 at 6:57 am

    How is this different than Microsoft Live FolderShare?

  15. Victor

    April 21st, 2006 at 7:16 am

    It seems to me that MS “Live Care” program will be the portal for this kind of service.

    Two Links to see

    http://www.windowsonecare.com/.....tails.aspx

    http://www.windowsonecare.com/.....fault.aspx

    Check out my podcast at http://www.typicalpcuser.com and http://www.typicalmacuser.com

  16. JR

    April 21st, 2006 at 7:31 am

    Or I suppose you could use Firefox and add the gsapce extension. That sure as hell look like a Google Drive to me.

  17. Brian

    April 21st, 2006 at 7:50 am

    Peter,
    FolderShare is great, but requires a computer to be on, and is more of a copier than a drive.

    Live Drive is storage in the cloud.

    I could see users who don’t have their own computers REALLY liking this service.

  18. Todd

    April 21st, 2006 at 9:07 am

    If Microsoft can get it to work with mobile phones ( that’s ANY mobile phone, not just ones running Windows Mobile ) it will be hugely popular…

    …but I have a sinking feeling that it will ONLY work with Windows XP, Windows Mobile, etc - making it utterly useless.

    T

  19. JOJOFACE

    April 21st, 2006 at 11:10 am

    I’m extremely happy with Box.net.

  20. Jason

    April 21st, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    I’m using Omnidrive as well as my school’s FTP space for my file storage needs at the moment… though I’m still looking forward to trying Live Drive :)

  21. Robby

    April 21st, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    I think the main difference between .Mac and these two new services will be compatibility. I may be mistaken, but don’t you have to have OS X to mount there virtual “drive” ?

  22. rickfle

    April 21st, 2006 at 1:23 pm

    Will non-geeks upload their tax records and video-chats with Grams to an off-site drive? Will corporations trust this kind of storage? It’s great for most of us reading this stuff; I wonder if the non-geek public will understand and support this. How is this different from XDrive, and who is using XDrive still?

  23. Eli

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:17 pm

    I personally would not be too sure about the supposed timeline, after seeing what happened with Calendar. You know, being released so soon while a lot of people (your sources too) saying that it would take some time. They are putting a lot of money into capital investments so you never know.

  24. Ed Kopp

    April 21st, 2006 at 2:42 pm

    Wow, this is huge. I’m a big fan of Windows Live, and this would make me an even bigger fan. My big question is whether it’s free or not. I could certainly see this being viable as free if it’s ad-supported.

  25. Björn

    April 21st, 2006 at 3:25 pm

    > If Microsoft pushes this, they’ll be first.

    Wrong. There’s been a similar service available from Apple, called .mac (former iTools) since 2001.

    It’s called .mac and it holds all your movies, photos, writings etc.

    Check it out here: http://mac.com

  26. Mickeleh

    April 21st, 2006 at 4:04 pm

    iDisk with .mac is great (and accessible to non-Macs), but limited to 4GB and costly.

    Store everything offsite? In a world where the government is already into warrantless wiretaps? Not for the paranoid. Or sane.

  27. Jo

    April 21st, 2006 at 4:27 pm

    As much as I love my mac, the whole idrive thing still sucks pretty bad as far as user interface, and it’s a major pain to use on my pc - I have major bandwidth at the university, but still idisk crawls.

    I’m loving box.net right now as far as interface, speed, etc. Some of these others I’ve tried are so darn clunky it reminds me of old FTP interfaces. Blech.

  28. Scott

    April 21st, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    Big deal about iDisk and .mac being “first” to offer online storage. It’s funny that I’ve never heard of it until MS and Google are reported to be developing it.

  29. Keith

    April 22nd, 2006 at 7:41 am

    That is really good. I’ll be looking forward to Microsoft Live Drive. With past experience with Microsoft Live Office and Microsoft Live Mail, their initial release was pretty terrible, because accessing applications on their servers were pathetically slow (like a snail crawling compared to hare as in GMail). However, over the past few weeks, they have improved the bandwidth and accessing the site were much better, albeit not as fast as GMail.

    Nonetheless, I am looking forward to Live Drive. I hope they will do a good job in terms of bandwidth resources. It is quite unacceptable if the bandwidth is not good enough, to transfer data.

  30. Jonathan

    April 22nd, 2006 at 10:30 am

    Comment by Mickeleh — April 21, 2006 @ 4:04 pm

    “Store everything offsite? In a world where the government is already into warrantless wiretaps? Not for the paranoid. Or sane.”

    That’s where encryption comes in to play… AES with 256-bit keys scares the Gov’t because it is very hard to crack.

  31. firmy

    April 23rd, 2006 at 5:11 am

    i use this, very good,
    1G for free:
    http://www.gbaopan.com

  32. Björn

    April 24th, 2006 at 2:26 am

    No doubt, .mac needs improvements - especially in the case of storage.
    I have to admit, it’s sometimes a pain in the *** loading stuff up to the iDisk. This definitely needs to be improved.

    >Big deal about iDisk and .mac being “first” to offer online storage. It’s funny that I’ve never heard of it until MS and Google are reported to be developing it.

    Read the news, get the whole view, not only the Windows side of the tech world.

  33. tallpole

    April 24th, 2006 at 6:22 am

    Comment by Jonathan…

    The fallacy with that argument for the truly paranoid is that AES-256 is an encryption scheme developed in part by the government- other algorithms exist, some of which (like blowfish) are deemed preferable for reasons of speed or design, but in the end- whenever you publicly put your documents out, you can not ensure they will not be read.

    It’s kinda like putting your money in a safe and then putting it out on your front yard- someone can still get into it, and perhaps the fact that you have attempted to make it harder to get at will make it a more conspicuous target.

  34. Nanboya

    April 25th, 2006 at 1:28 pm

    I’m in awe at how many options we now have for these online virtual storage places.

    It’d be nice to see who’s been in the business the longest and/or who is in best shape for staying alive for at least the next few years.

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