Will gdrive kill the PC?

(by Richard Holway) You can’t have missed the many articles about the impending launch of the Google’s gdrive. Eg The Guardian’s Google plan to make PCs history. According to blog reports – then taken up by the world’s media – Google will soon launch the ability to store all your PC hard disc data ‘in the cloud’ and access it from any Mobile Internet Device (MID). All the articles then suggest that this is the end of the PC and its associated hard disc. We will all use Netbooks or whatever.

This is a theme I’ve had in my presentations for many years – see Mytop. So I completely welcome this. My complex life means that I use about five different ‘devices’ each day. It always seems that the bit of data, email, photo etc I really want is on another device! Having it all in the cloud and accessible from all devices (albeit with the right security) would be great. BUT, I would never give up my hard disc. Firstly, I’d always want a local backup and secondly there are still many areas where I cannot get fast broadband access (eg on the train) so I’d still need a local hard disc.

But this is certainly yet another step in the right direction. I wonder when Holway will ultimately get his Martini Moment – where MyTop will work “anytime, anywhere and from any device”?