Xdrive

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

~ the eulogy ~

online storage was a category i could read about as an engineering student but not really sign up for. by 2005 i was on ttnet adsl in ankara with a 1 mbps line and a 10 gb internal hard drive that i never managed to fill. the idea of paying a service to hold a backup over a slow uplink was not a real product story for me. xdrive was an american-aol-tied service for most of its visible years and the free tier wanted an aol screenname that i did not have.

brett o'brien founded xdrive technologies in 1999 in santa monica during the dot-com first wave. the company had raised real money and run a free-tier consumer drive plus an enterprise pitch in parallel. the dot-com bust hit and the company restructured, the second life was a smaller paid-only service that kept the lights on through the mid-2000s. aol announced the acquisition on 4 august 2005 for a price the trade press reported around 30 million dollars.

aol pushed xdrive as a free 5 gb drive for any aol screenname starting around august 2006. the paid 50 gb tier sat next to it at 9.95 a month. the product was integrated into aol pictures and aol mail. on 24 october 2008 techcrunch published the wind-down memo, xdrive sat on the shutdown list next to aol pictures. the service ended on 31 december 2008 and the stored files were deleted after that date.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

this happened more in the american broadband market than where i pretty much was. the storage pitch in 1999 was that a hard drive on the internet would replace floppies and zip disks for file transfer between two computers. xdrive offered a virtual drive letter on windows that mounted over the wire. that user experience was good when it worked and unusable when the connection dropped, which on a 56k modem was constantly. the enterprise pitch was the same drive letter with admin controls on top.

the 1999 round closed at around 70 million dollars in equity, the company had a real office in santa monica and a sales team. by 2001 the consumer free tier was gone and the company was paid-only, which kept the burn manageable through the bust years. the 2005 aol exit was a soft landing for the cap table, but aol got an asset built for a connection speed the average consumer did not have.

~ the unraveling ~

the integration into the aol product portfolio took longer than the press release suggested. the free 5 gb tier did not launch until august 2006, a full year after the deal closed. dropbox had already filed its first paperwork. by 2008 dropbox was in private beta and the user-side story for "sync a folder, get it on every machine" was working without an aol screenname.

back then. aol was in the middle of the time warner separation conversation and the broader platform retreat. the october 2008 memo from kevin conroy named xdrive next to aol pictures on the shutdown list. the official reasoning was strategic refocus on advertising and content. the unofficial reasoning was that an aol screenname was no longer the wrapper anyone wanted around a personal file store (or whatever it was called).

~ what it became ~

dropbox public-launched in september 2008, two months before xdrive's shutdown date. the timing is striking and probably not coincidental. the cloud-drive category did not die with xdrive, the category just moved into a product that did not require a screenname from a dial-up provider. by 2012 box and google drive and microsoft skydrive were each running in the hundreds of millions of accounts. xdrive was already a closed url that returned a 404.

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