This is unexpected given their position on it before [1]:
Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.” ... “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
Are they admitting they were too ambitious? This seems to weaken the case for the mostly file-less ChromeOS and competes with their Google Storage offering.
Excellent find. In my company we really don't have files: everything is "cloud" (we use Google Apps and a little of box.net) and that seems as a future.
If this is true, I will be a little irritated because Google is not fixing simple things in Google Docs (like that stupid thing that all new documents are immediately saved as "Untitled" without even asking me what would be a name of documents). Now they are building something completely unrelated to what they were telling us.
Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.” ... “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
Are they admitting they were too ambitious? This seems to weaken the case for the mostly file-less ChromeOS and competes with their Google Storage offering.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-...