MSN is developing a new Windows Live service - Live Drive - which is a virtual hard drive for storing hosted personal data, apparently similar to rival Google's Gdrive, news of which was leaked in March, reports PC Magazine. Both Google and Microsoft have been mum about details. Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie acknowledged Microsoft's Live Drive plans in an interview with Fortune Magazine published on April 19.

"Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data," according to the Fortune article. "With Live Drive, all your information - movies, music, tax information, a high-definition video-conference you had with your grandmother, whatever - could be accessible from anywhere, on any device."

In March, Google's plans were revealed when PowerPoint slides and their accompanying text comments from Google's presentation to analysts were inadvertently published online.

Among those PPT comments: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today."

At the time, Jack Schofield of the Guardian's Technology Blog wrote: "This is a classic Evil Empire idea. If it was proposed by IBM or Microsoft, it would be dismissed as deranged. And Google is, of course, exactly the same sort of multibillion dollar multinational corporation as IBM and Micrososft, even though it claims to be different ("Do no evil"). It's a strategy that George Orwell would appreciate."