GDrive = “syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds” sounds exactly like Dropbox.<p>Apparently they are thinking too far ahead in the future where Internet connection is ubiquitous and super fast while ignoring the reality.<p>Dropbox's popularity proved GDrive would be a great product. I would guess the engineers at Google should be as good as, if not better than, guys at Dropbox. Given the planned launch time in 2008, it might very well kill Dropbox right at the beginning, or Dropbox might be a no-go for YC since Google would be doing it so good for free.<p>PS: Does anyone feel this is just internal politics to kill competing projects so his own project (Sundar is the lead of Chrome) can get more resources?
<p><pre><code> "I don't think we need GDrive anymore." Horowitz
asked why not. "Files are so 1990," said Pichai.
"I don't think we need files anymore."
</code></pre>
I wonder what they would think of that statement given Dropbox's adoption.
Dear Google, you're doing it wrong. We understand that you would like google lockin on our file system, but the rest of us who do not necessarily have 24-7 100% reliable connectivity or prefer to work on things quietly offline (for instance, competing search technology) might think files resident somewhere else might not be so bad.
"I don't think we need files anymore."<p>what does that even mean? even excusing the technical silliness of the statement, it's not even sound conceptually, unless "docs" are somehow not files. maybe, "we don't need a (hierarchical) file system"?<p>I also don't believe that "The service still doesn't offer a way to sync files" is true, incidentally. You could say that the service doesn't offer a pre-built, user-friendly way to sync files, but the documents API is pretty decent when I've used it (but maybe you can only sync docs, not any file?? a-ha!)
<a href="http://cyberduck.ch/" rel="nofollow">http://cyberduck.ch/</a> allows access to google docs via it's FTP client, pretty sweet.<p>I still prefer dropbox though but I use encrypted disk images for documents.
so google docs is the google wave of file storage?<p>said that: i use google docs but i just love my dropbox (after i got rid of the growl spam the installed on my system)