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A Very Prosaic Side Benefit of GDrive for Google
SmoothSpan Blog — ... Om Malik is on a more interesting track.  He has quit worrying about whether GDrive will change the world and started wondering what’s in it for Google.  After all, times is tough even at the Big “G”, so there better be some real strategic or monetary return for this GDrive thing to make sense.  Om says any ad revenues are meaningless to Google from this source.  They just won’t amount to much.  Here is Om’s view of the grand strategy behind GDrive: ...

Web Apps Suck at Service [GigaOM]
GigaOM Network — ... Reading the article, I realized that the underlying issue with many web apps and cloud offerings, are that some of the largest providers are not in the service industry. Microsoft sells software and Yahoo and Google sell ads. But to provide cloud computing, storage or applications involves providing a service — it puts the “S” in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Being a service provider comes with certain expectations, such as offering limits on the amount of data one can store (question 6) and clear knowledge of what happens to data should a ...

Box.net Will Refocus on Business Users [GigaOM]
GigaOM Network — ... Box.net says it has about 50,000 business users, but will those be enough to keep the company from being crushed by big gorillas (currently) in the mist? Microsoft, EMC, and Cisco Systems are all going after the storage-collaboration market. A few days ago, rumors surfaced about Google’s GDrive, another competitor to tiny Box.net. (Related post: Why Google needs the GDrive to fight Microsoft.) ...

Particle Debris (week ending 2/6) New Hardware for Apple Customers
The Mac Observer — Particle Debris (week ending 2/6) New Hardware for Apple Customers by on February 6th, 2009 at 4:25 PM On Monday, I found an interesting posting by Om Malik who tried to make sense of the strategy behind the rumored Google alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint -- called Gdrive. Like Apple's iWork.com and Microsoft's SharePoint, this service is intended to be a cheap storage cloud in the sky, for collaboration, that continues to support Google's business agenda. On the plus side, the data is available from anywhere. On the negative side, the data is subject to Google's ...

Why Sync Is So Difficult [GigaOM]
GigaOM Network — ... Some of these difficulties are just inherent to sync, but the technology is maturing. Sync so far has meant something different to everybody. Even the industry’s main players still sell byproducts of sync rather than sync itself, which then compete with backup, online storage, photo-sharing or music-streaming services. Sync is a great enabler for all these connected services, one that’s becoming central to the personal cloud story of more and more companies. ...