G-Drive

G-Drive

What is this X-Box design reject that’s nudging its way onto tech pages everywhere?  Apparently it’s Google’s latest stab at the cloud.  It’s the cloud – but in a nice tangible box.  Or rather, it’s a device that lets you access Google’s mighty servers and store all your stuff on them.

Google’s still a bunch of high-school geeks coding up “cool stuff”

But does this cut to the root of the problem?

I don’t think so.  Google seems to argue that somehow this box will “amalgamate all of its services” but I think it’s a desperate attempt to think around a problem rather than dive in head-first and solve it.

So what’s the problem?  It’s this: Google’s wasting its advantage in being early to market with cloud-based could-be solutions by not providing Enterprise-class cloud services.  Google docs is great but it’s totally focussed on the consumer end of the market.  We need tools with more functionality, or at the very least we need them marketed at business.  Google doesn’t seem to have the first clue at aiming its products B2B.

Google’s still, at heart, a bunch of high-school geeks coding up “cool stuff” before moving onto the next project – or buying it out.  Time to grow up, Google.

Update:

Our senior developer Richard Geary pulled me aside yesterday to tell me that the G-Drive would not, in all probability, as the Telegraph surmised with its Photoshop-suspect-image, come via an actual box.  I was shocked.

Frankly, though, I actually wouldn’t put it past anyone to do just that.  But just to illustrate that I’m not averse to a bit of Photoshop myself:

Obviously some things will have changed by the time of widespread adoption in 2015.  That ridiculous new Google icon for one.  But you’ll probably still be running XP.