Reuters: Google lets slip talk of online storage service: Google Inc. is preparing to offer online storage to Web users, creating a mirror image of data stored on consumer hard drives, according to company documents that were mistakenly released on the Web. The existence of the previously rumored GDrive online storage service surfaced after a blogger discovered apparent notes in a slide presentation by Google executives published on Google’s site after its analysts presentation day last Thursday.
I have my doubts that Google truly didn’t want this information out in the wild. The company showed the slides in question to analysts, after all, so there was no real secret.
The most interesting part of this story is what happened to the information, plus some of the Keystone Kops moves the company made along the way. Blogger Greg Linden found slides online with details. Google pulled the slides off its website and put up a PDF, minus some key materials. Commenters on Linden’s blog relocated and posted the missing material.
Then, Linden and others noticed that notes from the slides contained other material Google a) didn’t mean to put out because b) it contained outdated revenue and profit projections (Reuters). Yike…
Lessons? Among them: It’s hard to keep secrets if you put things on the Web.
And this from Linden, who gets the last word: “Google’s mission may be ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,’ but some information is not intended to be accessed by all.”
on Mar 8th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
[…] You may have heard about Google’s inadvertent leak of their plan for the master scenario for world domination possibly called “GDrive”. Read about it here, or here if you aren’t scared to death just yet. […]