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Microsoft Plans Gdrive Competitor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the personal-virtual-bill dept.

gambit3 writes "From Microsoft Watch: The MSN team is working on a new Windows Live service, code-named Live Drive, that will provide users with a virtual hard drive for storing hosted personal data. From early accounts, it sounds an awful lot like Gdrive, the still-as-yet-publicly-unannounced storage service from Google."

7 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. free? by joe+155 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How free will this be, I meen both in speach and beer... I would like to see exactly what they would do with each file I upload (i might be paranoid and not having anything too important anyway)... I am also a little concerned about what might happen if the US govt. asks for all my data on their drives (again probably too paranoid)... also I like cheap things

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    *''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
  2. Even if the RIAA manages to ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    shut down peer-to-peer (or simply make people too afraid to use it), I predict that file-sharing will continue unabated as social networks form around these vast online storage facilities. Rather than having to download my music piecemeal, I can just grab someone's entire "g" or "i" or "m" or whatever drive full of gigabytes of tunes. A couple of online swaps and that 60 Gb iPod is going to seem a tad cramped.

    Cool.

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    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  3. "Live [blank]" is today's "Active [blank]" by Maxmin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Local Live, Live Drive ... ActiveX, Active Desktop,

    I keep noticing the trend: Microsoft gives their product names a prefix or suffix that adds a sporty/jaunty sense, without changing the name's meaning.

    Pure marketing. In the 80s they prefixed their software with "Microsoft" ... everything had to be "Microsoft [blank]." I liked that, gives strong brand identity. But the Live and Active monkiers are a bit confusing, as they don't contribute a consistent, useful meaning.

    --
    O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
  4. So... by Skynet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft's big secret Web 2.0 push is to copy everything Google does?

    OIC!

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    Execute? [Y/N] _
  5. need more than bandwidth for this by acvh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    mounting a drive over the Internet (do we still capitalize that?) involves much OS overhead as well, and that is very slow. during my brief, free, usage of .Mac and its iDrive I was frustrated more than anything else. perhaps if the OS is modified to strip out some of what it does when you mount a drive they can speed it up, but for now FTP serves me better.

    1. Re:need more than bandwidth for this by Sparky9292 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      mounting a drive over the Internet (do we still capitalize that?) involves much OS overhead as well, and that is very slow. during my brief, free, usage of .Mac and its iDrive I was frustrated more than anything else. perhaps if the OS is modified to strip out some of what it does when you mount a drive they can speed it up, but for now FTP serves me better.

      Yeah, I bought the .Mac package this year and I was suprised at how slow it is just to traverse directories. Apple needs to make it's .Mac technology as speedy as a normal FTP site. I don't know why it's that slow. I'm running on 256KB/s upload as well.

      Now it's cool to have autosyncronization of bookmarks, addressbooks, and certain folders; but the slowness of .Mac is something they need to work on.

  6. Re:What I want is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    [Shameless plug, probably about to be modded Offtopic]

    This probably isn't exactly what you want, but DriveByMail.com uses only encrypted transfer methods (HTTPS and SSH). We don't even have a non-SSL website. We send you CDs or DVDs of your storage too, so when Google puts us out of business along with everyone else in the online storage field, you'll still have a copy. We also have a guest folder with a different password, and a public folder. Actually, the public folder is not SSL, but everything else is. A SSL public folder just doesn't make sense.