In case there was still any doubt about the long-rumored “GDrive’s” existence, a page now appearing on Google’s search results offers a pretty clear indication that something is going on. On Writely.com – the online word processing service Google acquired in 2006 – a test page is now appearing with a title that reads “test page for Platypus (GDrive).”
Well, there you have it. → Read More
About a month ago, some additions to the code in Chromium (the open source browser behind Chrome) suggested that the long-fabled “GDrive” may be on the verge of actually launching. A week later, user-facing proof started appearing. Then earlier today, sharp-eyed social media consultant, Johannes Wigand, spotted something interesting during a presentation at a Google-sponsored event: something that sure looks a lot like Google Drive.
And it is.
Over the past month, we’ve been able to dig up more information about Google Drive. First of all, it is very real. And it is being used internally at Google. Of course, it was also real back in 2007 and 2008 before it was eventually killed. But talking to employees back then who saw and used the service all agreed that it was pretty wonky and not ready for prime time. This new version is expected to be much better. → Read More
About a week ago, I noted that Google may be on the verge of resurrecting the “GDrive” project, also known as “Google Drive”. The service, which was previously used internally at Google under the codename “Platypus”, was killed off in 2008. But code found in Chromium recently suggested that it may be making a comeback. Specifically, there was a note to add the non-existant (to the public) drive.google.com domain to a secure list in the browser’s code. Today brings another clue.
We’ve just been tipped about some language inside of Google Docs which also points to Google Drive. Apparently, when some users go to delete a document in the recently-updated UI, they’re getting a message that the “items have been removed from your Google Drive”. There you go. → Read More
In 2006, Google was internally testing a project codenamed “Platypus”, an online storage service. When it was accidentally disclosed during an analyst meeting as “GDrive”, it quickly captured the web’s imagination. Google seemed on the verge of transforming their servers into our own personal hard drives in the cloud. Plenty of startups were working on this (and still are), but the presumption was that Google would be able to scale this beyond anyone else and do it for free, or very cheap. Google refused to talk about it, but story after story after story kept coming.
Then something weird happened: GDrive never actually launched.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that we found out what happened, thanks to Steven Levy’s book In The Plex. In 2008, GDrive was about to launch under Bradley Horowitz (now a lead on Google+), but Sundar Pichai (now the SVP of Chrome) convinced Google’s top executives not to launch it. The reason? He felt like the concept of a “file” was outdated (sounds more than a bit Jobsian) in the cloud-based universe that Google was trying to build. After some debate, the powers that be at Google agreed and GDrive was shelved, and the team moved over to the Chrome team.
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Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped received and attempted to install a leaked copy of the GDrive client being used by Google employees. He was unable to login after installing (our belief is it must be used from an approved IP address) it but posted some interesting information. Platypus syncs an online copy of selected files with a downloaded local version. Users can share by individual or project and can provide view or edit permission for individual users. GDrive shows up as a separate drive icon on users’ computers and can be accessed via a static URL. Internal users by default get a mere 500 MB of storage each. Philipp posted the Platypus Help file for Windows and Linux as well. There’s no evidence that the program is set for public launch any time soon, but hints supporting such speculation have been popping up now and again for some time. Here’s a quick timeline of previous TechCrunch coverage of the illusive GDrive product: In March Google held an analyst day that included documentation of a future offering called Google Drive, emphasizing security, cross application, platform and device access. The information was quickly taken offline but Michael Arrington wrote a summary of “what we know” about Google Drive to date. In an April post about Microsoft’s forthcoming Live Drive, Michael Arrington wrote the following. “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).” In July Corsin Camichel discovered a brief description of GDrive on the newly acquired Writely servers, which was quickly mirrored before Google took it down. Not a whole lot of details but it was seen as some level of confirmation of the project’s existence. If we needed any proof that Platypus at least exists, today’s leak might be it. Some people say (Paul Graham for example) that the best way to predict what Google will develop well for commercial release is to watch what they use internally. A lot has changed since we wrote our overview of online storage in January. Watch for the release of ZohoDrive soon as well. Does this leak mean anything in particular? It’s hard to know, but there’s at → Read More
Another hint at a coming online storage service from Google has been discovered by bloggers and quickly taken down. Corsin Camichel took the smart if logical step of adding index.html to the end of Google’s Writely.com URL and found a page allegedly detailing a Google storage service, codenamed Platypus. Since being blogged about, the page is offline (the link is to a mirror). Since the entire story is based solely on this one screen shot, this is little more than a highly speculative rumor at this point. We wrote about GDrive in March when information about the product was released by Google in an analyst presentation. Nothing seems to have come of it yet. There are any number of Google services under development and many bloggers complain (myself included) once they are released that they fail to meet expectations. Why then all the hype today over a single page on another domain about possible service features? Apparently Vista uses perpetual delay announcements to secure mindshare pre-launch and Google gets to reap the benefits from playing whack-a-mole with bloggers eager to chase after any whiff of a service that could launch some day. Wake me up when there is reason to believe that launch is coming. → Read More
We have all the ingredients for a great story: dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors. Here’s what we know so far: Epic 2015 – Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives In the spring of 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson presented the ominous Epic 2014 (now renamed Epic 2015) that ultimately predicts that Google will force the New York Times to shut down. In the movie, they also predict that Google will launch something called “Google Grid”: “…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.” See the movie here. Google Drive Discussion with Analysts Robin and Matt’s Google Grid prediction seems to be well on its way to becoming reality. On March 2, 2006 (a few days ago), Google hosted an analyst day and presented a wide range of information on new products and strategies. Among the information was a description of the upcoming “Google Drive”, a place for users to store 100% of their data online. On page 19 of the presentation, Google stated the following: Store 100% of User Data With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user. As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine. Another important → Read More
