Two XDrive articles in one week …

Windows XP is going to use XDrive …
It appears from this ZDNet article that Windows XP is going to be offering XDrive on the desktop … or advertising a partnership on the desktop. I’m wondering if this is being done with closed, proprietary protocols, or with any WebDAV (or other?) standard protocol and solution.

Another failure being designed before our eyes?
I am always amazed when these types of adventures begin. IMHO, I believe that they are doomed to fail.

First, their storage costs are *so* expensive … why would I pay ~$70/GB/Month for storage, when I can buy a 30GB harddrive at Costco for ~$140?

Second, their main costs are not involved in the storage … it’s the backbone network costs. They are having to pay for the bandwidth for user to send and retrieve data across the backbone of the Internet … to their centralized location.

The way that I believe that this is going to be solved is when every ISP get’s into the storage and caching market … they’ll realize that they can offer their users storage and backup services for very agressive prices … and they already own the bandwidth of the last mile to their users.

Xdrive Sees Outage, Shelves Free Storage for Fee System. The Santa Monica, Calif. provider of storage for end users experiences a brief outage and gives up on giving out free storage for a subscription-driven model geared toward businesses. [internetnews.com: Product News]

Who is going to pay these centralized guys these rates? If people do, I don’t think it will last … I think they are dead already. I’m looking at how this will relate to, and effect, our Novell iFolder solution? We are putting any corproation or ISP into this business. So if an ISP installs iFolder for their customers, they could be getting a chunk of this revenue …