Evidence of GDrive in Google Apps
Rumors of an online storage solution from Google have been circulating for years. These rumors became stronger in July last year when references to Platypus and GDrive were accidentally made available on the writely.com domain.
Context & Ripple Effects
The GDrive story has been running for over a year: Geekness reported Google testing an online-storage service under the codename Platypus in July 2006, Blogoscoped followed with a leaked GDrive client that October, and just two weeks ago the question turned negative with a rumor that the Gdrive release had been canceled. Both traces point at writely.com — the domain of the word processor Google acquired and has been folding into its Apps suite.
Today's finding puts new code-level evidence of GDrive inside Google Apps itself, which cuts against the cancellation talk and suggests storage is being wired into the suite rather than shipped as a standalone product.
First-order effects
- The August cancellation rumor now faces direct counter-evidence: GDrive references appearing in Google Apps indicate the project is alive inside Google's application stack, resetting expectations from 'if' to 'in what form.'
- Google Apps gains a plausible missing piece — a storage layer under Writely and the rest of the suite — strengthening the product Google has been assembling through acquisitions like Jotspot.
Second-order effects
- If storage ships bundled into Google Apps rather than as a separate paid service, standalone online-storage providers face a competitor that can price storage at zero as a suite feature.
- The pattern of leaks — Platypus on writely.com in 2006, the leaked client last October, today's Apps references — keeps pressure on Google to either ship or formally kill the product, since each sighting re-arms the rumor cycle.
Third-order effects
- If GDrive lands inside Google Apps, the default home for user files starts migrating from the local disk to a hosted account tied to a productivity suite — a shift in where document infrastructure lives, with lock-in following the account rather than the machine.
- A free-or-bundled storage tier from Google would push online storage toward commodity status, rewarding whoever controls the surrounding applications rather than the bytes themselves.
The trend: Consumer file storage is drifting from desktop software toward hosted suites, with Google's Apps acquisitions positioning the company to make storage a bundled feature rather than a product.