Moogle1

GDrive Isn’t Without Competitors (or Omissions)

Posted by Mike Bijon March 06, 2006

Garett Rogers of ZDNet confirms that Google GDrive is not a rumor. Despite how tired of hype each new Google product recieves I’m eager to see the front-end of anything Google comes up with. I recently switched jobs and am leading the development of an enterprise-class web app with an AJAX front-end. Having dug through all the GUI javascript I can find - the back-end complexity and front-end simplicity of Google’s AJAX interfaces are amazing. Despite the quality of Google’s code the hype still gets to me, after all what percentage of the free webmail market are they serving? The online drive market isn’t without entrenched competitors either. Of course, all the competitors I’m aware of are missing out on the one feature that could make the service a no-brainer (and beat Microsoft to the same thing in their Windows Live services).

Speaking of competitors to GDrive, remember Xdrive? They survived the 1999 explosion of bloated heads & web companies with a solid subscription product that also works as a simple collaboration tool for remote workers and info-driven consultants who are smart enough not to attach everything to an email (since 2000, I’ve worked with contractors in both groups who have pointed me to files in their Xdrives). …actually I think the Sharepoint collaboration tools in Microsoft’s Office Live would be a booming success if they have as much market penetration as I’ve seen with Xdrive.

Speaking of SharePoint, it’s a solid competitor to the unreleased GDrive itself. Microsoft isn’t in on the game yet, but there are plenty of hosted SharePoint services from 3rd party hosting companies. The Office Live system will also include SharePoint, plus the Office features and online applications should garner enough attention to get SharePoint the attention it’s been lacking for years.

GDrive isn’t without examples to support that a similar Google service would see good usage. The GMailFS is a program that allows access to the already free GMail’s 2+ GB of storage and it’s already popular with the geek-set (especially a few Linux users I know, who enjoy mocking how tedious I find my own SharePoint system). With the GMailFS program installed it’s possible to save files directly to the Gmail maibox almost as easily as saving them to a Windows ‘My Documents’ folder. However, Google must be well aware of the bandwidth problem mentioned by Garett Rogers’ sources though; I know someone who had their GMail account closed down for “abuse of the service” not long after he started using GMailFS.

It’s easy enough for a techie with a server, or ten, to host their own online WebDAV or SharePoint drive. What makes GMailFS so popular is that it’s hosted by a third party on reliable connections and servers - and it’s free. Should Google follow tradition and make GDrive free too then they’re bound to take a good chunk of the market - right up until they have to stop registrations because their servers and, this time, the pipes too are overloaded (ala, the Google Analytics service)

That “Killer” feature:
Truely roaming Windows user profiles. 90% of computer users are on Windows and every one of them that I know has or wants a laptop. As soon as someone gives them the ability to mirror, with limited features depending on connection speed, not only files but their user profile - checkmate to everyone who can’t follow quickly.