Comments for Windows Live SkyDrive Launched - Enters a Crowded Online Storage Market

Windows Live SkyDrive Launched - Enters a Crowded Online Storage Market

2007-08-10T00:52:39Z

Today Microsoft announced Windows Live SkyDrive, the final product name for its online storage solution - previously known as Windows Live Folders. Windows Live SkyDrive has a few new features and enhanced UI, in line with upcoming changes across other Windows Live services.

Windows Live SkyDrive offers users 500MB of web space for storing and sharing files. Microsoft says it is like "a personal 'harddrive' on the internet". By default, you get several protected directories which you can store your files in, meaning they are private and protected from public viewing. You can also share folders publicly, or just to specific people on your Windows Live Contacts list. The service allows you to set 'read' and 'write' permissions for folders. Windows Live Folders was first discussed back in April 2006, so this is the culmination of over a year's work.

The Competition

Currently SkyDrive competes with a host of other online storage solutions, including Omnidrive, Steekr, XDrive, box.net and others. Many of these startups attempt to differentiate themselves by offering 'value add' services such as social networking functionality (e.g. Myfabrik), APIs and partnerships with other web 2.0 services (e.g. Omnidrive). Some also focus on specific parts of online storage - e.g. Egnyte is focused on collaborative document sharing. Also a lot of the so-called WebOS startups offer online storage as a key part of their package. Finally, social networking services such as Twango, recently acquired by Nokia, have online storage as an essential part of their make-up.

]]> Of course the big companies can afford to just offer a fairly low-frills version of an online storage product, and compete on volume. As yet, the persistent rumors of a Google GDrive have yet to be realised, however there is one bigco that is well advanced in this space - Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant's Simple Storage Service (S3) is part of a compelling WebOS stack that is being used by a lot of startups as their storage solution. Amazon's solution is not free, although unlike SkyDrive it offers unlimited storage.

How SkyDrive works

Brandon LeBlanc from Microsoft created a video demo, which shows the new product in action:

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2007-08-09

2007-08-10T05:14:36Z

Shell extension and a virtual filesystem around LiveDrive will be a killer. But for now, I see nothing interesting; MS may be waiting for their new ultra-reliable data center to be completed.

Comment from Abhishek on 2007-08-09

2007-08-10T05:52:00Z

Nothing too special. Box.Net does these things already. Not to mention the other 10,000 services.

Google also announced their storage solution today. Interesting twist is that the storage is linked with their existing services like GMail, Picasa etc.

Check out my post on it labeled GDrive is Live!
http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2007/08/10/gdrive-is-live/

Comment from Dan Grossman on 2007-08-10

2007-08-10T07:07:33Z

Don't forget that this is competing with a commercial Microsoft product. Windows Home Server will hit shelves any day now, and it's targeted to home users, so while it's an operating system, I'd expect it to be cheap. In addition to all the backup, system restore, and other features it'll offer, it provides centralized online storage space for the family. Users will get a yourname.homeserver.com URL to access their shared files over the internet. Providing too much storage and too many features on the free online service might cut into sales of Home Server.

Comment from musana on 2007-08-10

2007-08-10T09:11:59Z

Well, apart from the fact that it's not working right now - that's OK though, let's give them a second chance - let's not forget that there is storage and there is usage: what do you store the content for. It's not the subject of your article but it leaves a whole new horizon for in situation storage like what we try to do for music at Musana. Please feel free to ask for private beta invitation on http://www.musana.com and give us your feedback. Tell us what's best, storage or usage.

Comment from Juan C. Sosa on 2007-08-10

2007-08-10T17:25:19Z

DropBoks gives you 1GB (doubling Skydrive), UI is great, minimalistic and usage is dead simple.

Juan C. Sosa
CEO
Intelways.com
The one-stop search tool

Comment from dc crowley on 2007-08-12

2007-08-12T08:42:04Z

I am wondering about Amazons s3. Would you use that for personal storage? It is marketed as cheap file hosting for web apps. Am I missing something?

Comment from David Friend on 2007-08-18

2007-08-18T22:39:31Z

Richard: I am glad you refer to SkyDrive as "online storage" rather than backup. Many writers confuse the two. My company, Carbonite, is in the backup business. Backup, as serious players in this field know must be:
1) Completely automatic, set-and-forget (nobody remembers to "do" their backups)
2) Unlimited (or at least VERY large) capacity. If you are constantly running up against limits, you never know whether you're really fully backed up, and it's a pain. The average PC today has about 17GB of data.
3) Encrypted. Data must be encrypted BEFORE it leaves the user's PC. Communications should always be SSL. Nobody is going to use an unencrypted service for real backup.
4) Should be REALLY simple. Backup is not like file-sharing. It just runs in the background and there is no need for a lot of features. Like an insurance policy, really.

SkyDrive, and Google's G-drive for that matter, are not backup services and your readers should not confuse the two.

David Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.

Comment from Sam on 2007-08-19

2007-08-19T11:39:54Z

I have been an enthusiastic DriveHQ user for almost 2 years. Their service is great!

All GDrive features are long available and better on DriveHQ.com. Visit www.drivehq.com and watch the demo.

# Backup. DriveHQ Online Backup works great. It has a lot of high-end features, much better than GDrive, including versioning, scheduled backup, encrypted storage, compressed upload, incremental backup and resuming, etc.

# Sync. DriveHQ FileManager can sync multiple PCs, multiple user accounts.

# VPN-less access. You can access your data from anywhere using a web browser, any FTP client, or DriveHQ Cline software, or SMTP/POP3 email with Outlook!

# Collaborate. DriveHQ Group Account service is a true enterprise class collaboration platform. You can easily share folders to different people with different access rights. DriveHQ Group Account owner / admin can create/manage/delete sub-accounts.

# Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible as DriveHQ FileManager can cache the data for offline access! DriveHQ even offers SMTP/POP3 emails for offline Outlook access with unlimited email storage!

DriveHQ offers basic service for free. So why the hype and why the wait? Sign up at: http://www.drivehq.com/?refID=2925384