Considering The Google Gdrive

Author JoeDigital

If you stepped off the bus earlier this afternoon, and walked directly into a high tech corporate office, you’d be presented with such exciting terms as “cloud computing”, “wi-fi”, and “remote access.” Someone might even have mentioned the still vaporware Google Gdrive.

Gdrive is hyped as unlimited, unhampered data storage. It can be used to store all of your files, including images, video, and music, and can be accessed from any computer, anywhere, anytime. Wow. That is quite an attractive boast, considering that only new part of the concept is the addition of making it perfect for “cloud computing” applications. Online storage has been around for more than 10 years, long before the mobile computing boom we are seeing today was even dreamed of.

And let us take a moment and consider this new phrase “cloud computing.” I distinctly recall, in 1996, watching the innermost working of a network reduced to a set of hubs and spokes on a whiteboard. And then other networks, also in the shape of spoked wheels, were drawn. And then a big fluffy cloud was sketched in around the whole thing, and the word INTERNET was boldy written underneath.

The Internet is the cloud of cloud computing. The first cloud computing tools put into widespread use were web browsers, and by the year 2000, countless applications from file storage to online calculators and utilities were being used by people all over the world. This was cloud computing, and it hasn’t changed in many ways, even today. It has become better able to process data for you, reducing CPU intensive applications, or completely eliminating the need to install a program on your computer, because it can be opearted just as efficiently, and across a greater number of computer platforms, by keeping the program based on an Internet server.

The Google Gdrive is likely to be a fantastic addition to Google’s suite of productivity applications based in the cloud, but it is simply an old idea being presented in a new way. It is far less impressive than the productivity suite of Google Docs, but is likely to receive great acclaim becuase it is managed by the increasingly powerful folks at Google.

Technorati Tags: google, gdrive, cloud computing