ZumoDrive

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

~ the obituary ~

ZumoDrive was built by Zecter, a Y Combinator company started in 2007 by David Zhao, a former Amazon developer, with Kevin West and Vijay Mani out of Microsoft. TechCrunch covered the private beta on 16 January 2009 and handed out a thousand invitations, and the public beta opened on 25 February. Dropbox had launched the year before, so the obvious move was to copy it. Zecter did not.

The difference was where the files lived. Dropbox put a folder on your disk and kept both copies in step, which meant everything in your account occupied space on every machine you owned. ZumoDrive mounted a virtual drive instead. The contents looked local to the file system and to every application, but nothing actually came down until you opened it. The client kept a predictive cache of whatever you used most, so the thing still worked with the network gone. On a 2009 netbook with an eight gigabyte SSD this was not a preference. It was the difference between having your files and not having them.

I was a few years into working as an engineer when this was current, and cloud sync was a category I paid attention to. ZumoDrive was not the one I ended up on and it was not the one most people ended up on either. The reason is not complicated. Dropbox was already winning, and the thing ZumoDrive did better was an answer to a constraint that stopped applying the moment disks got large again.

~ the case file ~

~ what it became ~

Motorola Mobility bought Zecter on 22 December 2010, and the consumer product was never really the target. Motorola wanted the streaming and caching technology for its handsets, and it got it. The team's other product, ZumoCast, streamed files off your own PC rather than off a server, and that became MotoCast and shipped on Motorola Android phones as the feature that let a phone reach back into a computer sitting at home.

The storage service was left running for another eighteen months. In April 2012 Motorola started emailing users that it was over. After 1 June 2012 accounts stopped working, and anything still sitting in them was deleted along with the account records.

~ the funny part ~

The idea ZumoDrive was built on was correct and simply early. Placeholder files that look local and download on demand are now standard equipment. Dropbox ships it as Smart Sync and Microsoft ships it in OneDrive as Files On-Demand. Both Windows and macOS eventually grew file-system hooks specifically to support the trick, which is the strongest possible admission that the trick was worth supporting.

So the feature that could not save a startup in 2012 is the default behavior of every major cloud drive now. It needed the operating systems to meet it halfway, and they took another five years to get there.

~ what came after ~

Motorola Mobility was bought by Google in 2012 and sold on to Lenovo in 2014, and MotoCast did not survive the trip. The acquisition that killed ZumoDrive produced a feature that itself lasted about three years inside a company that changed hands twice while it was running.

What Zecter actually left behind is the pattern, and the pattern is everywhere now and attributed to nobody. Nobody thinks about ZumoDrive when they switch on Files On-Demand. That is the ordinary fate of a good idea that arrives before the platform is ready to hold it.

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