Search engine giant Google will soon launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection making the desktop computer virtually redundant, predict technology experts.
The GDrive system will merge Google’s all existing web-based services to make them easier to use together. It could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet.
“Throw your hard drive away, Google’s Gdrive is arriving in 2009,” the Telegraph quoted TG Daily, an American technology news website, as predicting.
The GDrive would make it possible to access and update information like emails, photographs, music, documents and spreadsheets from any device with an internet connection.
The novel system is being described as “cloud computing”, wherein the web rather than the hard drive is used as the place where information is stored. Google experts are said to have begun convincing the world of its benefits.
It is believed that the GDrive could “cause a major paradigm shift in how we use computers and bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop”.
However, there are some who think that trusting Google with so much personal or commercial data is dangerous, for information may not be as safe in the cloud as it is in a computer.
Peter Brown, of the Free Software Foundation charity, said: “Does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?”
A Google spokesman refused to confirm whether the GDrive launch was imminent.
