But soon, you'll be able to upload any file into the "google-cloud" and store it online as Google leaked news of its upcoming online storage product.
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This is hardly a new or necessarily earth-shaking move. Yahoo has had online storage for eons with its Briefcase product; Amazon has its S3 offering, which serves both individuals and developers; even Microsoft has gone into beta with a product, SkyDrive. And a slew of startups from Box.Net, Mozy, Carbone, Xdrive and others.
We recently published a SmartList of Online Storage Providers that covered this market in-depth.
So what does Google have to offer? The biggest innovation, according to WSJ.com, would seem to be to decouple the “upload” process from the Web browser:
Along with a Web-based interface, Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter.
That would be interesting: some sort of desktop widget that would allow dragging and dropping content out onto the network cloud.
The bigger issue will be pricing. Google has actually been fairly stingy with its online storage. Though it was the first to offer massive amounts of online storage with Gmail, other providers have leapfrogged them – Yahoo offers unlimited storage, for instance.
Over time, the sheer scale of Google’s massive data centers, not to mention the billions of dollars it rakes in every quarter, should help drive the cost of online storage – even lots of it – down to nothing.
Which is something any small business user can appreciate.
