GDrive is Google’s long-rumoured online hard drive in the sky which might offer unlimited space for all of your files. Descriptions of GDrive have appeared in newly updated code on the Google Pack site.
Just as rumoured last week, Apple is taking iWork ’09 online, with file hosting and group editing services. Think of it as MobileMe, but for your documents. And that’s not all.
9 to 5′s latest Apple rumour is that the iWork suite, Apple’s Office competitor, is going to the cloud.
Many have said that the future of Microsoft will be in subscription-based software, cloud computing or some combination of the two. Well, let’s hope that it doesn’t turn out anything like patent application 20080319910.
Telstra and Microsoft are going to be getting nice and cosy starting from mid 2009 to offer small and medium businesses a whole host of cloud computing services. The arrangement will use Telstra’s NextG and NextIP networks and Microsoft’s back-end business software to bring fast, always-on communications across a whole raft of devices, from computers to mobile.
The announcement today is a little light on specifics, instead talking more about the partnership, but it does hint at some of the possibilities, including hosted business applications, mobile services and devices and unified communications. The idea is to offer powerful software solutions at a fraction of the cost by offering them up in a subscription-like format.
If you’re a small business owner, this could be a great way of managing your day-to-day business needs, although until we see some pricing from either Telstra or Microsoft, we’re going to hold our breath on the whole affordability thing.
Added to the list of things that Steve Ballmer and Google have polar opposite opinions on is “cloud computing,” which Ballmer argues consumers don’t really want. In an interview with a Brazilian news source, the Microsoft CEO contended that even the best cloud computing applications would still have to be based on some pretty great software, a.k.a. Windows.
Waaay back in 2006, Cablevision planned to roll out a DVR which stored shows on Cablevision’s servers rather than on hard disk inside your set-top box. As they are wont to do, the studios and networks saw an opportunity to suck more revenue out of the system, citing obscure copyright conditions which call for fees when content is “retransmitted” in any way. Now, a judge has smacked down their suit to block remote-storage DVRs, meaning DVRs in the cloud could see the light of day after all.
That’s what SD Times is claiming, based on “internal Microsoft documents” that give more details on the skunk-works research project currently brewing in Redmond. The docs supposedly hint at a fleshed out platform for distributed concurrency–which entails moving what used to be core desktop OS functionality into the cloud for a partially or fully web-based platform. And while it almost certainly won’t make Windows 7, Midori could be the first step toward severing ties with legacy Windows once and for all.
Mossberg has rolled out an in-depth review of MobileMe backed by a week of testing in today’s WSJ, and if you’ve been following our coverage it won’t come as too big of a surprise that he’s not a fan. But his problems with the service go well beyond the launch hiccups you’ve read about. So what’s got Mossberg so riled up that he’s thrown down his big badhammer on MobileMe?
After opening up more spots in the technical beta last week, the Live Mesh folks got a bit ahead of themselves and accidentally let leak a pre-release version of the Live Mesh Mac client, which brings file and data syncing, but no remote desktop control yet, to Intel OS X machines. The download link is gone now, but the folks at jkontherun were able to grab it and put it through its paces and grab some screens. [jkontherun via Liveside]
