Microsoft is building an online storage service, code named Live Drive, says Ray Ozzie in an interview with Fortune:
Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. 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.
Ray also mentioned web storage in an executive staff memo published by Dave Winer last October. See “Seamless OS” under “The Opportunities”.
I am banging down every door I know at Microsoft to get more information on this, but I don’t expect further comments. From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously).
If Microsoft pushes this, they’ll be first. More on this story from Mary Jo Foley.
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