After a video titled "Googley Blues" was made public for a short while on YouTube (before being marked "Private"), it seems that the ominous GDrive looks to be on the backburner at the Googleplex, if not totally killed.
The video featured a Google employee singing with lyrics placed over images, and included the GDrive icon (a platypus, which was the project’s nickname for a while) with the following lines placed on the bottom of the screen: "I’ve been ready to launch my product since 2002 … At least round here 5 years ain’t so long overdue."
A leaked PowerPoint presentation revealed that Google was planning an online storage spot where Google could "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)."
This, of course, didn’t rub privacy advocates the right way, and the fact that GDrive has fallen off the map for the past year or so will have done nothing to quell these fears and concerns.
Google seems to be trying its best to stick to its self-imposed policy to cut the fat, or "Count total number of Google products and reduce by 20%," as was stated in a 2006 internal company paper.
There is little doubt that GDrive is still something that Google has its eye on. It has not shied away from gathering and utilizing as much information as it possibly can, and GDrive seems to be an ideal apex for this pursuit. If it does rear its head again in the near future, it will be interesting to see if Google changes the product’s name or tweaks any of its original objectives.
Sources:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-19-n82.html
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