Presently, Kaplak has a need for an internal, simple yet powerful online file sharing utility. We’re talking about simple intranet stuff, but without the complexity of setting up an intranet. We don’t need an intranet. We need to read and save documents and spreadsheets.
We can get it now with Gmail and the Gmail Drive Shell extension by Bjarke Viksøe. As a hack, this extension has some limitations, but it is a great temporary solution. I wondered if we’d be able to search through attachments, but alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
They should do that had an interesting article from two years back discussing the extension of Gmail into an attachments browsing utility, which I roughly translate into a storage & sharing facility for attachments – also known as files. This is essentially a simple filesharing movement building out of Gmail, building on the simple needs of people with free storage on their hands.
It should be obvious the need is there. This is simply the most needed functionality for lots of people and businesses. Forget the Google Apps, Google Groups or Google Sites. We need a GDrive, a simple place to place stuff, where people we work with can get it and upload their stuff too. No profiles, no more social networks or group functionality, we have lots of that – simply storage available for simple filesharing.
I can think of one reason Google won’t move down that alley, and that’s fear of intellectual property problems and the threats of litigation costs etc. The same reason why Google Books never took off, and why most books are not fully readable or available to non-US residents. Why “snippets”?
Well, that ought to leave this window of opportunity open to others, but noone has the power of the Gmail apparatus already in place.
Another reason might be the risk of undermining Google’s own business in intranet and local search for businesses, as well as their Groups and Apps product ranges. But as Google earns most of the company’s revenue from advertising (including ads in Gmail), this should be a small camel to swallow.
Thanks for the tip about GDrive to Anders! (Anders Nicolaisen and Jesper Lund have recently joined the Kaplak Team – a formal introduction will follow shortly :-) )
