kent's posterous

make a da world go round

Filed under: ideas

Where's my G-Drive?

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I am big fan of Google and their line of products, but I cannot believe that they haven't released G-Drive.

What is G-Drive.

 G-Drive is cloud based file system that will replace hard drives and solid state drives found in our laptops and desktops.  It will be the first cloud based filesystem and will store all of your documents in the cloud.  Computer will likely have a smaller solid state drive, or hard disk that will act as the Swap / heap / page file for the Operating system.  Basically you will only cache things locally as you need it, most of the data will be stored in the cloud.

Imagine if your entire computer was Dropboxed.  That's what I am getting at.  However, the index would go deeper than 1 folder.  It would be your entire system and would be completely customizable. 

When I watched E.P.I.C. so many years ago, I was blown away.  As I went through grad school and saw what people were doing with filesystems, databases, new internet protocols, I realized that everything in there was very possible.  This was exciting.

How would it work?

Quite simply :)

1.  Install G-Drive.
2.  Tell G-Drive which directories / files to sync.
3.  Wait about 3 days for the magic to happen.
4.  That's it.

All changes will be synched, all versions kept (to a degree).  In fact, as I am writing, I just noticed that Google Docs has added revisions.  This is going to happen!

Then, in the next few years when Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google, Acer, Sony etc.  release ever smaller and lower memory footprint machines, all of the data can be accessed and cached locally using the G-Drive.  Bandwidth goes up, local storage goes down.

Use cases

There are so many potential use cases for something like this, but here are a few.  Yes, they are very similiar to Dropbox.

Collaboration.    Rather than sharing / emailing files back and forth you can share folders or entire partitions of your drive with work, friends.

API endpoints.  Every media based service on the planet could use this as a media backend similiar to what Amazon has done with S3.  Google is known for good APIs and programers would love to store their stuff on the G-Drive.

Public records.  Imaging having direct access to documents / data from the internet.  The internet is a collection of webpages, G-Drive, could be a true distributed global filesystem.

Why no G-Drive yet?

Obviously the storage needs for a service like this are HUGE.  However, if anyone is going to do it, it will be Google.  Think of all the Google Apps Premium users they have, and they all have up to 25GB of mail storage plus another few GBs for documents.  That's a lot of data.  Is it possible that Google could take on our hard drives?  I honestly don't know and cannot be bothered to do the calculation, but I have a feeling that they can.  

Maybe they don't think the world is ready to hand over their hard drives to Google.  I agree.  I think a lot of people are not.  However, I do know that I would be very willing to partition my hard drive and let Google sync that to my G-Drive.  I would keep most of my documents, all of my pictures and videos along with other, big and frequently unused files.  I would also pay a lot of money for this.  I would pay $50 / month.  If they had more features, I might be willing to pay $100.

Bandwidth

**Correction - Originally I claimed to have a 20/3 GB connection.  This was a mistake.  It's MB not GB.  Still good, but not God like :) Thanks for the Errata Steve **

I am blessed with good bandwidth.  The office that I work out of many days of the week has a strong 17d/10u (10 MB download / sec : 10 MB upload / sec) LAN which is amazing, and at home, I opted for business internet so I get about 20d/3u (MB).  I would have no problem using G-Drive, others might not be so lucky.  However, this is changing.  Maybe Google's Fibre for Communities initiative is trying to lay the infrastructure for something like G-Drive. 

Privacy

There will be problems.  Enough said.

Thoughts?

What do you think about this?  I would use it and pay for it.  Would you? 

Dropbox, if you would like me to start working on this for you I would love to.  Let me know ;)

Thanks for listening,

Kent

 

Is Google preparing for a Tsunami?

Recently, Google announced that it was killing Google Wave.  That's too bad really, I love Google Wave as did many of my clients.

There has been a lot of speculation about why Google might have killed Wave, Dick Wall from the Java Posse threw out the idea that it could have been too much bandwidth compared to any return they were getting.  Maybe it just go too expensive for them.

I find that hard to believe.  I think Google would have done their homework on the costs of servers and made that decision a long time ago.  They gave Google Wave the show at Google I/O 2009 and it just seems weird that they didn't expect a flood of people to use it.  Which brings up the next scenario, maybe they really got it wrong.

Sometimes, even the experts make mistakes and maybe there really wasn't a clear path to market for Google Wave and given all of the pressure from Microsoft, Facebook etc they decided to start focusing on things with a clear revenue path, so Google Wave got the axe.  However, this doesn't seem right either.  Why would they spend so much of their time working on side projects and then kill off one of the coolest ones.  They had clear marketing problems and most people had no idea what to do at the beginning, however, if you used it for more than 5 minutes and invited some of your friends in, you realized pretty quick it was a game changer.  Take it up a notch and invite your co-workers and your boss and you have yourself a fantastic team collaboration app.

I have an idea.  Google is preparing for a Tsunami.

The more time I spent with Google Wave the more I realized it had the chance to become the killer application for small-medium business who already use Google Apps.  For example, being able to collaboratively write emails, documents, spreadsheets etc, are all things that companies do now only the process is inefficient and clumsy.  If this was tied more cohesively into one product that allowed authoring, collaboration, chatting, real time editing, emailing etc, it would become the dashboard for thousands if not millions of people around the world. 

However, Wave is open source.  A lot of what Google does is open source, but nothing really close to the chest is, or at least not all of the pieces.  Since they created wave to be so open, it would be hard for them to develop this kind of product and change Wave at the same time. 

Maybe they killed Wave so that they could focus on creating Tsunami. 

Tsunami = Docs + Email + Wave + Voice

I have been thinking about this for a while and when Google added the Call from Gmail feature, I saw it as more evidence that are building GMail into a place that you NEVER need to leave.  They are transforming their Gmail client into THE productivity application for information workers.

This is pure speculation.  Clearly there are so many factors that go into these kinds apps and decisions, many are over my head but selfishly, I really hope I am right.  In my consulting practice Google Apps is a godsend to clients, but they all keep asking for similar things.  They keep asking for a unified view that marries, Wave, Docs and Email. 

I think Google knows this and if they don't... consider them told.
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