Put it in drive: whether or not it’s another symptom of Microsoft’s efforts to match its competitors’ splashiest moves, Microsoft Watch says that the Redmond giant is working on Live Drive for Windows Live, which is purported to be a virtual hard drive with excessive capacity designed for personal use. The Live Drive project echoes Google’s GDrive endeavor, news of which accidentally leaked early last month.
Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie told Fortune about Live Drive in a profile published yesterday. Here’s a snip from the mag:
“Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data…With Live Drive, all your information – movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever – could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.”
Well, our grandmama prefers that our high-definition videoconferences be stored locally. In fact, one question that dogged the GDrive idea was whether folks would be comfortable uploading and storing scads of personal data on remote servers, where they might get hacked, erased forever (see “Mail, G”), snooped at, subpoenaed by Uncle Sam, what-have-you.
Live Drive mirrors GDrive in another important respect: not many details have been forthcoming. We don’t know how big it would really be, or how expensive to use, or how Microsoft would plan to monetize it. A subscription, perhaps, or a per-gig fee; maybe they’ll just serve ads against your niece’s baby pictures.
