by Playfuls Staff |
21st April 2006
Sometime ago, we reported about the rumors that Google plans to unveil a new Web service, called GDrive. The source of the rumors was a fragment from a presentation made by Eric Schmidt at an investor conference. According to reports, GDrive would be [more] some sort of combo between a storage service and a backup solution, the users being able to keep there their most important documents, bookmarks or whatever they might think of. Moreover, this type of service wouldn’t represent such a novelty, because there already exists a piece of software, called Gmail Drive, which creates a virtual files system based on the space offered by GMail.
Although Google did not confirmed officially this project, it seems that Microsoft, in fact the MSN team is working on a similar project, which will be included as a part o Microsoft’s Live.com project.
According to Fortune Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie publicly acknowledged Microsoft's Live Drive plans in an interview published on April 19.
"Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data," Ozzie told Fortune. "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."
According to Mary Jo Foley from Microsoft Watch, Microsoft officials declined to comment on LiveDrive.
The concept of online storage is nothing new and that are there are already several companies which, for a monthly or annual fee, rent a certain number of MB in order for users to save those essential data that they don’t want to lose if a personal computer begins to malfunction. But with GDrive and LiveDrive, we are talling about something different. A large amount of space and most probably free of charge services.
So, if MSN Team intentions are real, we might say that the two tech giants, Microsoft and Google, has a new battleground.
