Omnidrive

» see omnidrive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2007 the upload side of a TTNet ADSL line ran at a small fraction of the download side, which is the number every online storage pitch of that era quietly skipped. Omnidrive's pitch was that your files could live somewhere else and still behave like a folder on your own machine. On paper it was the best version of that idea anyone had shipped. In practice it was a handful of people in Wollongong trying to run a filesystem for the world.

Nik Cubrilovic started the company in late 2004 and opened a private beta in February 2005. The trick that set it apart was mounting. Omnidrive installed as a drive on Windows and as a volume on the Mac, so you saved into it from inside any application, with no browser in the way. It also published an API, and around five hundred developers signed up to build against it. Roughly twenty thousand people from more than seventy countries got into the beta.

Money followed the idea. TechCrunch ran two admiring posts about Omnidrive in December 2005, one of them headlined "Online Storage Perfection", and Michael Arrington later became an investor, a sequence he took criticism for at the time. Georges Harik and Jeff Clavier also put money in, and the company launched publicly at the Web 2.0 Conference in November 2006. Dropbox would not open its own beta for another eighteen months.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The product was a drive letter. You dragged a file into it and the file went up, and underneath there was a sync layer trying to hide the wait. It also hooked into the web office tools of the period, so a document sitting in your Omnidrive could be edited in a browser and written back to the same place. Local behavior on top of remote storage is now the whole category. In 2006 it was still a demo people asked to see twice.

~ the decline ~

The sync layer was where it came apart. Users began reporting files they could not reach for days at a time, and support tickets that went unanswered for longer than that. Through 2007 the outages got worse instead of better, and the company kept pointing at a rewrite that would fix everything.

By the end of that year the money was gone. The chief technology officer left and said publicly that the company had run out of cash and let its entire staff go. Cubrilovic disputed that reading in May 2008 and asked people to wait for a product that was still coming. An angel investor who had put in a hundred thousand dollars wrote that he was ninety-nine percent sure he would never see any of it back.

~ the day the domain turned ~

The website outlived the service by a long way. Omnidrive's own home page, signup link still in the corner, was being served as late as 25 July 2008, well after the storage behind it had stopped being trustworthy. By early October the domain was carrying advertisements for cash advances. The capture from 16 December 2008 is a payday loan page titled Amnesty Financial Plus, on the same address that had promised free centralized online storage five months earlier.

In June 2009 the domain began redirecting to a page Nomadesk had put up for Omnidrive's stranded users. Nobody ever published a figure for how many files were still sitting on those servers when the lights went out.

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