Google Buying Writely in GDrive Plans?
Google’s recent Analyst day slide show gave insight to Google’s GDrive and Lighthouse plans of hosting the world’s information and content at Google. Greg Linden got the blogosphere stirring with this snippet from a slide which was previously hosted on Google.
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS [Google Desktop Search], Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today.
Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc.
Now a new rumor posted by Om Malik lends more to the G Drive spin as “fairly reliable sources” leaked to Om that Google has its acquisition eyes on Writely, the very popular browser based document processing app which can be used to edit and create OpenDocument, Word, PDF and RTF files and blog posting.
What if you could write a document in a browser, much like you write on Microsoft Word, but then save it directly to the G:Drive? That would increase the utility of G:Drive tremendously.
Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice.
