14 DAY TRIAL // John Hodgson, a technical specialist with Microsoft Australia has revealed a few scarce details related to the Live Drive service prior to the debut of Tech Ed in Sydney as Microsoft is reluctant about sharing information on its virtual drive. Recently AOL has announced that it will debut a 5GB online storage service at the beginning of September dubbed Xdrive, on a free basis. AOL will also make available a premium variant of the storage service serving 50GB of space.
But as America Online's solutions are platform independent, Microsoft's own storage service will be intimately integrated with its upcoming Windows Vista. Hodgson confirmed that Microsoft will initially deliver 2GB of online storage space for free to all Vista owners. He also revealed that the Redmond Company will sell additional storage capacity. A pricing scheme has not been made available in the latter case, and Hodgson failed to announced definitive Live Drive release dates.
Live Drive will be mapped directly from Vista machines and will add to the array of online tools Microsoft has gathered under its Live umbrella. The Microsoft Live portfolio is designed as an integer part of the Redmond Company's decentralization efforts, online services being but an aspect of its multitasking strategy.