Rumours are strife that Google is on the verge or releasing its new cloud technology to the public – the Google GDrive. For several years now Google have been focussing new developments on software that runs off their own servers, and stores data on their own servers. They running blogging platforms, email, discussion groups, photo editing, video sharing, documents, calendars, advertising solutions, document viewers etc. All of these are run off their own servers. In fact, the only Google products that can be downloaded are Google’s browser, Chrome, and Google Earth, Google Desktop and Google Toolbar. No doubt Google Earth will eventually be fully “clouded” at some stage.
But what is next? The next step is to open their servers so that anyone with a Google account can store any of their own data on the Google drives. This will allow you to access your data from anywhere in the world, and more easily share with friends and family. To do this, Google are developing the GDrive (short for Google Hard Drive) which will allow users to store photos, videos, documents, emails, music – anything. All that will be needed to access the information is a browser and internet connection.
So, why is this so interesting? Well, both Google and Microsoft are now focussing on building the “cloud” technology. Once all applications and programs are available over the cloud, traditional computers with programs and applications will become obsolete. Also, operating systems will become less important, as so long as you have a fast internet connection and a good browser, then you can run any program. And Google’s browser, Chrome, has been designed with speed and efficiency in mind. This will be the ideal tool for accessing the GDrive. In fact, it is possible that this will be the only way to access the GDrive.
This is exciting news for the consumer. For anyone that has experienced hard drive failure, or had their system destroyed by viruses or hackers, the idea of having a safe storage area for all data is good news alone. But also, the GDrive could mean that any operating system needs to be a “barebones” affair. The are also many rumours that Google is planning to release its own operating system, which is likely to be based on the Unix system (maybe they will call it GUnix? Could GUnix kill Microsoft?), and also open source and free to download like the various Linux distributions. If this is the case, Microsoft may well be shedding more than the 5,000 jobs it culled last week. Although businesses are likely to be slow to adopt the cloud technology or anything other than Microsoft for some time yet.
Google is still holding the cards tightly to its chest with regards to when it will be released. But it looks likely to be this year. And Gunix could be following soon. Or maybe they will just call it Android Desktop.
