Look for the G-Drive in 2012 or 2013. It will be a piece of engineering genius that nobody will use. Over-engineering is Google's achilles heal and Dropbox is exploiting that brilliantly. Microsoft and Apple are irrelevant-- they are committed to closed platforms and they haven't demonstrated any competency otherwise. Dropbox should be a textbook case for how scrappy startups can compete against the behemoths.
Edit: Dropbox biggest competition seems to be the shift from file systems to apps. A Google acquisition seems most likely. Personally I think Apple should snap them up for deep integration with iTunes/iOS. It could be a perfect marriage, but it doesn't seem like a very Apple thing to do.
interesting perspective. I agree and disagree. I think Google could over-engineer it, but UI aside, there needs to be some "intense" engineering to scale this reliably across the globe. I don't doubt that Dropbox could do it, but I feel Google is poised for something like this. To their credit, they have gotten a few things right ;)
When I left, it had been in development for 5 years. Definitely looked for an over-engineered solution that is pushed out in some desperation to ship something.
Why wouldn't Google just buy out Dropbox? Anything they need to build wouldn't be that complicated (what, selective syncing is hard? Isn't there a unix util that did that decades ago?) and they would have the advantage of a honed conversion funnel and solid wom marketing.
Why would Google buy dropbox? How does it fit with their established advertising business? How does it feed into their other offerings?
Your claim seems to be "dropbox is profitable, therefore Google should buy it" - Ben and Jerry's is profitable but I don't see it as a potential Google acquisition.
Dropbox is built for a time when the desktop is still relevant. Google are gearing up to overthrow that paradigm. Dropbox doesn't have a clear link to the web at large, or to search, or to the creation and indexing of content. Those are the attributes I associate with "google acquisition fodder". Compare tineye.
If Google do buy dropbox, it'll be as a talent acquisition and/or so they can leverage the userbase into a chrome OS based solution.
As much as I love Dropbox I have a feeling they're gonna get squished by competing products from Google, Apple, and Microsoft that integrate into mobile platforms.
I suspect that Apple is already out to completely redefine the Memory Hierarchy. In the process Dropbox will get squished or redefined out of existence.
I was thinking today: If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? Laptops and mobile devices should have a completely different memory hierarchy:
- Registers
- L1 and L2 cache
- Main Memory
- Persistent Memory
- Cloud Memory
The 1st three are also what we have today, but the last two are completely new. Persistent Flash stores are faster but more expensive than spinning magnetic platter. Cloud Memory is vaster and omnipresent, but much slower and less reliable than the hard drive. Together, they can fill in each other's weaknesses and create something vastly more useful than the old spinning hard drive.
Apple is moving in this direction with their new Macbook Airs, which have taken the first step by taking the MLC Flash chips out of the pointless metal box and placed them on a form factor somewhat like a DIMM. They have moved even further with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Here, we have computers as powerful as workstations of the mid-1990s, but there is almost no notion of a Disk Drive. Instead, files are organized primarily by the Apps that create and manage them.
My prediction is that Apple is moving toward a world (at least for the average user) where there are only Apps and your data magically takes care of itself.
EDIT: Does anyone else also realize that a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk? Now that we have RAM-like stuff that's cheap enough to use in spinning-disk quantities, we don't really need the kinds of boot-up procedures we have now.
Indeed. Under the section of the YCom application for "Who do you fear most" the Dropbox founder wrote, "Google's coming out with GDrive at some point. "
If you think all 3 of these companies (and probably more) need an offering in this category & if you think one or more will fuck it up, fail to ship, etc that actually puts dropbox in an amazing position. They've already executed, the product rocks, and they have a ton of users locked in. They even have a billing relationship with a good percentage of users.
Of course, dropbox is most likely going to say thanks but no thanks to these early offers, and the big guys will kick themselves down the road.
Dropbox has the advantage of being the go-to solution for crossplatform developers. If I write a native app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone and OS X and Windows and want the data easily portable across all of them Dropbox is the obvious solution.
I (sadly) agree. Dropbox is such a great idea, and like many great ideas, it's ridiculously simple. As I see it, there are four key ingredients: delta transfer, cross platform filesystem notification, the web UI, and the code needed to wire it all together.
The first is open source (librsync) and the third is pretty much a garden-variety hierarchical, AJAX-enabled database browser. You'd have to surmise that companies like Google or Amazon, with so much in-house talent, would be much better off writing the proprietary, closed-source portions from scratch than paying a hefty premium for them on the open market.
The main argument against that is that it hasn't happened yet.
This idea is just so obvious and stupid simple that it boggles the mind that nobody has really done it. You can look at all the major players and they actually all have deliberately crippled half-implementations. For example SkyDrive should be a Dropbox killer, but for inexplicable reasons MS has never made it so you could just 'mount it as a drive' and thus it is nearly entirely useless. The trivial work it would require for MS to do that and the wildly useful properties of having that feature can only mean that MS has deliberately decided to cripple it. Gdocs is the same - in theory you can shove anything into your gdocs account and get it out again. But Google, who could so easily do it have never released a utility to mount that space as storage.
I'm really curious about why every player is half doing this and then stopping short. It can't possibly be that they are all too dumb to see how useful it would be - it can only be that they see significant risks or negative consequences in doing so.
Well, despite Apple and Microsoft's offerings, Dropbox has done well so far. Google hasn't come up with a dedicated syncing system like Apple, MS, or Dropbox offer, but competing well against 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
Google doesn't have a Dropbox product, but Google has put together a series of APIs so that you can create a similar product of your own off their infrastructure.
It was presented at Google I/O 2010; though perhaps it didn't make as big a splash considering everything else that was discussed there. Here's the session page on it:
Not really about the point you were making, but...
Google seems to be aiming this at enterprise customers looking for essentially a private cloud SAN. Their fees otherwise seem quite high.
Lets compare pricing:
Google: .17/G storage .10/G in .15/G out US/EU .30/G asia
AWS <10TB : .14/G storage .10/G in .15/G out US/EU .20/G out asia
AWS =100TB: .14/G storage .10/G in .07/G out US/EU .11/G out asia
Loss leading CDN: as low as .10/G storage - .01/G in - .01/G out US only (new customers only)
Biggest video CDN =250TB: ??/G storage - .10/G in - .10/G out US ??/G out asia
Managed DFW colo =2TB: 250G storage free - .21/G in - .21/G out worldwide
Carrier hotel rack 100mb/s 1yr: ~.10/G storage ~.06/G in ~.06/G out worldwide - ~.02/G out citywide
Obviously services offered vary - but the only player google is beating on price is rackspace with their entry level commit, but the colo also gets you ~4ECU's, dynamic content and 24hr phone NOC.
Google competes with AWS at the low end but once you scale amazon wins by 50%-66% or more. Akamai beats google by 33% with a sizable commit but that gets you on net at ~1000 edges and a great SLA. Google won't even tell you where your content is - except that it's US only.
I think this is only being marketed at applications like b2b sales force hosting, data heavy scientific apps and enterprise offsite backups. You'd get killed trying to use them for a consumer service. I mean $0.30/GB to .au AND high latency?
The irony is that google's real operating costs are probably the lowest out of any of the players at least for US delivery. Their backbone enjoys tremendous scale based on their search & ad traffic and everyone peers with them.
I'm surprised that google is really slow to move on this. Our organisation has already been using Google Apps for a year or so and want to replace our network shares. With all our user accounts and email groups, Google is in the best position to do execute yet the lack of good solutions means we're likely to look elsewhere.
There's a couple of third parties that integrate with Google Docs, but none of them fit the bill from some quick internal tests. Gladinet - unreliable with certain functions. Insync - still very much "beta" mode; no folders, no business plan options.
I'm using Google Apps in an SMB, and it's great for zero-admin, but downloading attachments to a download folder, finding them again by filename, doing 'save as' to avoid filename collisions so you can save changes, is a total pain in the ass. And we still need a network drive. We still use Google Apps in spite of this but handling file attachments seems unnecessarily difficult. And no, Google Docs is not a solution. Not all attachments are .docs, some of us use CAD files.
Dropbox, fully integrated with Google Apps and Chrome's Downloads folder, would mean the end for millions of intranets.
Google has made a habit of entering new markets with products priced at 0, destroying competition. In classical economics this is called "dumping", and the only reason they can afford it is because of the huge cash cow that is online advertising.
I would much rather have a healthy ecosystem with many smaller companies competing with paid services (you know, paid, with terms of use, support, and all that), than yet another free service from google and works except when it does not and there is no one to turn to in case of trouble.
Why would a cloud-based filesystem be useful beyond storing your home folder? It's not like you need group collaboration on your kernel binaries. You also can't really run different computers off of the same harddrive image (unless you are a corporation and buy multiple, identical machines).
I don't think dropboxing an entire harddrive is required. Case in point: I use dropbox for my school files, personal docs, etc and it works wonders. Copying my copy of /bin/bash is kinda pointless.
Posted a reponse over on my blog, but figured I'd post it here as well in case you didn't find it (mostly because no one reads it. =))
--
Kent asked “Where’s my G-Drive?” where he pondered what it would be like to have your computer dropboxed (verbing the noun). He went on to dream of a time when your computer was essentially just a thin client connecting to a remote server run by Google, and a all your data was stored there. He listed off some really cool use cases, and then went on to explain why they weren’t a possibility yet. Bandwidth, privacy, space, etc.
But he’s thinking small. He’s also not ignoring some fundamental human concepts, and also why Dropbox is successful.
First, let’s look at why Dropbox is successful: automatic syncing. I can be on my computer, move to my iPhone, and still have all the files. Move to my laptop, and the files are there as well. You can even log onto their website into your account and access your files.
None of this is data backup. It’s all syncing. Once you realize why Dropbox is successful, you realize what you are actually looking for. You are looking for a device that intelligently syncs your data across all your devices without needing to sacrifice bandwidth, eliminating privacy concerns, and not requiring massive amounts of storage.
So, let’s move on, and discover what the service will be that takes the throne.
First, it will focus on syncing intelligently. This doesn’t mean syncing everything all the time, but syncing what you use. There are things my iPhone can’t open that I sync via Dropbox. It’s useless to download this. It’s also useless to sync this over the web when my phone and computer are on the same network. So, the idea is to sync, but only when needed. Sync-on-Read. Bandwidth here is an issue, sure. But only in speed, and frankly, when your living in an era when streaming HD movies is a reality and common place, it’s not a big concern. Let’s just say, Sync-on-Read is no more a problem then the current Sync-on-Save model currently in place. Also, once something is synced, it can be stored locally.
Next, since you only sync when you read, that means you need to connect to machine that holds the data. The downside here is that you need to connect to your home machine to access the data, and the machine needs to be powered on. But, I venture to guess that anyone using a system like this would keep their computers on anyways. After all, a computer shut off can’t sync regardless. Of course, you could also ensure that the system will figure out where it can get the file. If I have a file on multiple machines, and the main machine is off, the software can still grab the data.
The benefit to this is you still get to store you data locally. Local storage isn’t going away. People want their data. Sure, they want backups, but if their internet goes down, they don’t want to lose access to the data. And adding more data to the system is easy. Just add another hard drive like you do now. Also, the service provider need not store the data remotely. They just need to keep track of your various machines, and make sure machine A can speak with machine B. This eliminates privacy concerns. Instead of worrying how much disk space to rent, you just handle it yourself.
Essentially, you turn this from a push environment into a pull. You aren’t handed data, you ask for it. The service provider would manage things like figuring out which file is the latest copy, and keep track of local copies in case something changed and you didn’t want.
Kent’s original plan was “Install G-Drive, Tell G-Drive which files to sync, Wait 3 days for the magic to happen, That’s it.” In my plan, the idea can essentially be “Install G-Drive” and that’s it. Take your phone with you, and have access to the file. Technically speaking, it’s not incredibly difficult. It’s making the workflow easy. Dropbox easy.
Who will deliver this? Apple has the best opportunity to do something like this. They have the complete infrastructure, from hardware to software, to handle something like this. Controlling the entire pipeline, it’s really just a willingness on their part that is needed. Consider for a moment that they already have MobileMe which handles a lot of this. Microsoft can do this. Live Mesh and SkyDrive were initial attempts at this field, but still, it’s not a complete end to end solution like what I discussed. Google, if anything, is the one company farthest behind on this. They have various services, like Picasa, that already handle online storage. The problem is syncing everything together across the OS. MS and Apple both have their own operating systems and phone platforms they can use to bring it all together. Google is missing out (and while Android is awesome, it’s missing it’s older cousin, a Google OS that is actively being pushed).
Could Dropbox deliver? Maybe. At the software end, I think they could pivot fast enough and release a product like the one I discussed quickest. Will they? I don’t know. They’d have to charge for the service, and would someone want to pay for this? I would. A couple bucks a month to have all my computers synced like this easily would be nice.
I’d love to leave everything at home, and go, and not worry about forgetting to sync up the pictures this Christmas while I’m at my mother’s. If I want to show her videos, I shouldn’t have to plan that in advance.
Cloud storage is an excellent idea, don’t get me wrong. But I’d much rather have proper syncing first.
This entire idea of pull syncing is based on the premise that Netflix works, so bandwidth must be almost unlimited. But video streaming is a special case, in that the content is specifically engineered with streaming in mind, unlikely to be randomly accessed (but amenable to the procedure if it is), and streamed from a central server. Other content types often require the entire thing to be read before the data is useful. Also, most people's Internet connections have pretty lousy upstream (mine at home is about 14 KB/s, and at work it's about 200 KB/s).
"I venture to guess that anyone using a system like this would keep their computers on anyways" - way to limit your potential user base. I use dropbox to sync data between my work computer (turned on during the day, off otherwise) and my home computer (turned on in the evening, off otherwise) so the service you propose is useless to me and likely many other people who care about power usage.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding: but if you sync-on-read, the user still has to wait for the file to be downloaded if it's not synced up already. So maybe another model would be sync-on-save for those items that are appropriate for the device and that the user wants to have quick access to (whether because they've "favorited" them or via some other manual or automatic mechanism), coupled with sync-on-read for everything else?
Chrome can sync your bookmarks and extensions between browsers in different OS. So Google already has the technology albeit at smaller amounts of data.
OK, I'll bite. I will do a long bet that Dropbox either 1) IPOs or 2) has a $750MM+ exit by 2014. I can't guarantee that Dropbox IPOs the way that LogMeIn did, but the $750MM hedge is there to say that Dropbox is worth more to Google than Yelp was.
Apple: Hacker/tinkerers start turning netbooks into little OS X boxes. Eventually, Apple comes out with the 11" Macbook Air.
Google: Hacker/tinkerers start using their Gmail storage space as a cloud storage utility. Google does nothing. Eventually a 3rd party comes out their own solution with a brilliant additional twist, which becomes massively successful.
If I were Apple, I'd come out with my own Dropbox-like service and call it something like "Warp Drive." (Ansible? Wormhole?) I'd have it sync accounts on different laptop/machines based on about a dozen different "plans" which are never presented as a list to the user, but only suggested, based on their disk use. (Along with one or two options to "downsize" the plan.)
A "plan" for me might go like: store everything on the Mac Mini, because it fits there, and sync everything to the 256GB Air except the Movies directory. (Which will be available anyways through streaming like AirVideo does it.)
insynhq.com seems close to this (available on google apps marketplace)...perhaps google prefers to allow (charge) vendors to utilitize their storage and not have to worry about the customer service and software side of things...
[+] [-] oldgregg|15 years ago|reply
Edit: Dropbox biggest competition seems to be the shift from file systems to apps. A Google acquisition seems most likely. Personally I think Apple should snap them up for deep integration with iTunes/iOS. It could be a perfect marriage, but it doesn't seem like a very Apple thing to do.
[+] [-] oiujhygtfyhjuk|15 years ago|reply
Apple would make it apple only - which is kind of irrelevent to 99% of people.
Microsoft would just do it sooooo badly.
[+] [-] RK|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kentf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harscoat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user24|15 years ago|reply
Your claim seems to be "dropbox is profitable, therefore Google should buy it" - Ben and Jerry's is profitable but I don't see it as a potential Google acquisition.
Dropbox is built for a time when the desktop is still relevant. Google are gearing up to overthrow that paradigm. Dropbox doesn't have a clear link to the web at large, or to search, or to the creation and indexing of content. Those are the attributes I associate with "google acquisition fodder". Compare tineye.
If Google do buy dropbox, it'll be as a talent acquisition and/or so they can leverage the userbase into a chrome OS based solution.
[+] [-] sabat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstein|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
I was thinking today: If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? Laptops and mobile devices should have a completely different memory hierarchy:
The 1st three are also what we have today, but the last two are completely new. Persistent Flash stores are faster but more expensive than spinning magnetic platter. Cloud Memory is vaster and omnipresent, but much slower and less reliable than the hard drive. Together, they can fill in each other's weaknesses and create something vastly more useful than the old spinning hard drive.Apple is moving in this direction with their new Macbook Airs, which have taken the first step by taking the MLC Flash chips out of the pointless metal box and placed them on a form factor somewhat like a DIMM. They have moved even further with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Here, we have computers as powerful as workstations of the mid-1990s, but there is almost no notion of a Disk Drive. Instead, files are organized primarily by the Apps that create and manage them.
My prediction is that Apple is moving toward a world (at least for the average user) where there are only Apps and your data magically takes care of itself.
EDIT: Does anyone else also realize that a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk? Now that we have RAM-like stuff that's cheap enough to use in spinning-disk quantities, we don't really need the kinds of boot-up procedures we have now.
[+] [-] 27182818284|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brezina|15 years ago|reply
Of course, dropbox is most likely going to say thanks but no thanks to these early offers, and the big guys will kick themselves down the road.
[+] [-] rdrimmie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperbovine|15 years ago|reply
The first is open source (librsync) and the third is pretty much a garden-variety hierarchical, AJAX-enabled database browser. You'd have to surmise that companies like Google or Amazon, with so much in-house talent, would be much better off writing the proprietary, closed-source portions from scratch than paying a hefty premium for them on the open market.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|15 years ago|reply
This idea is just so obvious and stupid simple that it boggles the mind that nobody has really done it. You can look at all the major players and they actually all have deliberately crippled half-implementations. For example SkyDrive should be a Dropbox killer, but for inexplicable reasons MS has never made it so you could just 'mount it as a drive' and thus it is nearly entirely useless. The trivial work it would require for MS to do that and the wildly useful properties of having that feature can only mean that MS has deliberately decided to cripple it. Gdocs is the same - in theory you can shove anything into your gdocs account and get it out again. But Google, who could so easily do it have never released a utility to mount that space as storage.
I'm really curious about why every player is half doing this and then stopping short. It can't possibly be that they are all too dumb to see how useful it would be - it can only be that they see significant risks or negative consequences in doing so.
[+] [-] jasonlotito|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kentf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedc|15 years ago|reply
http://code.google.com/apis/storage/
It was presented at Google I/O 2010; though perhaps it didn't make as big a splash considering everything else that was discussed there. Here's the session page on it:
http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/google-storage...
Then again, I might be mis-understanding what the OP is asking for...
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
Google seems to be aiming this at enterprise customers looking for essentially a private cloud SAN. Their fees otherwise seem quite high.
Lets compare pricing:
Obviously services offered vary - but the only player google is beating on price is rackspace with their entry level commit, but the colo also gets you ~4ECU's, dynamic content and 24hr phone NOC.Google competes with AWS at the low end but once you scale amazon wins by 50%-66% or more. Akamai beats google by 33% with a sizable commit but that gets you on net at ~1000 edges and a great SLA. Google won't even tell you where your content is - except that it's US only.
I think this is only being marketed at applications like b2b sales force hosting, data heavy scientific apps and enterprise offsite backups. You'd get killed trying to use them for a consumer service. I mean $0.30/GB to .au AND high latency?
The irony is that google's real operating costs are probably the lowest out of any of the players at least for US delivery. Their backbone enjoys tremendous scale based on their search & ad traffic and everyone peers with them.
[+] [-] snagage|15 years ago|reply
There's a couple of third parties that integrate with Google Docs, but none of them fit the bill from some quick internal tests. Gladinet - unreliable with certain functions. Insync - still very much "beta" mode; no folders, no business plan options.
[+] [-] vdm|15 years ago|reply
I'm using Google Apps in an SMB, and it's great for zero-admin, but downloading attachments to a download folder, finding them again by filename, doing 'save as' to avoid filename collisions so you can save changes, is a total pain in the ass. And we still need a network drive. We still use Google Apps in spite of this but handling file attachments seems unnecessarily difficult. And no, Google Docs is not a solution. Not all attachments are .docs, some of us use CAD files.
Dropbox, fully integrated with Google Apps and Chrome's Downloads folder, would mean the end for millions of intranets.
[+] [-] jwr|15 years ago|reply
Google has made a habit of entering new markets with products priced at 0, destroying competition. In classical economics this is called "dumping", and the only reason they can afford it is because of the huge cash cow that is online advertising.
I would much rather have a healthy ecosystem with many smaller companies competing with paid services (you know, paid, with terms of use, support, and all that), than yet another free service from google and works except when it does not and there is no one to turn to in case of trouble.
[+] [-] sdz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianobush|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|15 years ago|reply
--
Kent asked “Where’s my G-Drive?” where he pondered what it would be like to have your computer dropboxed (verbing the noun). He went on to dream of a time when your computer was essentially just a thin client connecting to a remote server run by Google, and a all your data was stored there. He listed off some really cool use cases, and then went on to explain why they weren’t a possibility yet. Bandwidth, privacy, space, etc.
But he’s thinking small. He’s also not ignoring some fundamental human concepts, and also why Dropbox is successful.
First, let’s look at why Dropbox is successful: automatic syncing. I can be on my computer, move to my iPhone, and still have all the files. Move to my laptop, and the files are there as well. You can even log onto their website into your account and access your files.
None of this is data backup. It’s all syncing. Once you realize why Dropbox is successful, you realize what you are actually looking for. You are looking for a device that intelligently syncs your data across all your devices without needing to sacrifice bandwidth, eliminating privacy concerns, and not requiring massive amounts of storage.
So, let’s move on, and discover what the service will be that takes the throne.
First, it will focus on syncing intelligently. This doesn’t mean syncing everything all the time, but syncing what you use. There are things my iPhone can’t open that I sync via Dropbox. It’s useless to download this. It’s also useless to sync this over the web when my phone and computer are on the same network. So, the idea is to sync, but only when needed. Sync-on-Read. Bandwidth here is an issue, sure. But only in speed, and frankly, when your living in an era when streaming HD movies is a reality and common place, it’s not a big concern. Let’s just say, Sync-on-Read is no more a problem then the current Sync-on-Save model currently in place. Also, once something is synced, it can be stored locally.
Next, since you only sync when you read, that means you need to connect to machine that holds the data. The downside here is that you need to connect to your home machine to access the data, and the machine needs to be powered on. But, I venture to guess that anyone using a system like this would keep their computers on anyways. After all, a computer shut off can’t sync regardless. Of course, you could also ensure that the system will figure out where it can get the file. If I have a file on multiple machines, and the main machine is off, the software can still grab the data.
The benefit to this is you still get to store you data locally. Local storage isn’t going away. People want their data. Sure, they want backups, but if their internet goes down, they don’t want to lose access to the data. And adding more data to the system is easy. Just add another hard drive like you do now. Also, the service provider need not store the data remotely. They just need to keep track of your various machines, and make sure machine A can speak with machine B. This eliminates privacy concerns. Instead of worrying how much disk space to rent, you just handle it yourself.
Essentially, you turn this from a push environment into a pull. You aren’t handed data, you ask for it. The service provider would manage things like figuring out which file is the latest copy, and keep track of local copies in case something changed and you didn’t want.
Kent’s original plan was “Install G-Drive, Tell G-Drive which files to sync, Wait 3 days for the magic to happen, That’s it.” In my plan, the idea can essentially be “Install G-Drive” and that’s it. Take your phone with you, and have access to the file. Technically speaking, it’s not incredibly difficult. It’s making the workflow easy. Dropbox easy.
Who will deliver this? Apple has the best opportunity to do something like this. They have the complete infrastructure, from hardware to software, to handle something like this. Controlling the entire pipeline, it’s really just a willingness on their part that is needed. Consider for a moment that they already have MobileMe which handles a lot of this. Microsoft can do this. Live Mesh and SkyDrive were initial attempts at this field, but still, it’s not a complete end to end solution like what I discussed. Google, if anything, is the one company farthest behind on this. They have various services, like Picasa, that already handle online storage. The problem is syncing everything together across the OS. MS and Apple both have their own operating systems and phone platforms they can use to bring it all together. Google is missing out (and while Android is awesome, it’s missing it’s older cousin, a Google OS that is actively being pushed).
Could Dropbox deliver? Maybe. At the software end, I think they could pivot fast enough and release a product like the one I discussed quickest. Will they? I don’t know. They’d have to charge for the service, and would someone want to pay for this? I would. A couple bucks a month to have all my computers synced like this easily would be nice.
I’d love to leave everything at home, and go, and not worry about forgetting to sync up the pictures this Christmas while I’m at my mother’s. If I want to show her videos, I shouldn’t have to plan that in advance.
Cloud storage is an excellent idea, don’t get me wrong. But I’d much rather have proper syncing first.
--
http://blog.jasonlotito.com/uncategorized/whats-better-then-...
[+] [-] chc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] McP|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grourk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kentf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] codemechanic|15 years ago|reply
It has an underlying peer-to-peer and data sync service as well.
http://www.tonido.com
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ma2rten|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sachinag|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
Google: Hacker/tinkerers start using their Gmail storage space as a cloud storage utility. Google does nothing. Eventually a 3rd party comes out their own solution with a brilliant additional twist, which becomes massively successful.
If I were Apple, I'd come out with my own Dropbox-like service and call it something like "Warp Drive." (Ansible? Wormhole?) I'd have it sync accounts on different laptop/machines based on about a dozen different "plans" which are never presented as a list to the user, but only suggested, based on their disk use. (Along with one or two options to "downsize" the plan.)
A "plan" for me might go like: store everything on the Mac Mini, because it fits there, and sync everything to the 256GB Air except the Movies directory. (Which will be available anyways through streaming like AirVideo does it.)
[+] [-] rdouble|15 years ago|reply
http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/idisk.html
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
Privacy: There will be problems. Enough said.
I've also heard that death valley gets a bit warm in the summer.
[+] [-] brady747|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jagbolanos|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hmahncke|15 years ago|reply
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