Cloud computing is still far off, but Microsoft and Google are both eagerly working on "cloud storage" solutions in the hopes that you'll start keeping more and more of your data on their servers, keeping you coming back to their services (and the occasional advertisement). Apple has even awoke from its slumber to improve .Mac's storage options. Last week was a big one for these three behemoths, so let's take a look at what they've done.
First up, Google squashed any hopes that the company would keep on adding endless, free storage for its users when it formally rolled out paid storage upgrades that can be used across both Picasa Web Albums and Gmail (and coming soon, Google Docs & Spreadsheets). For $20 per year, Gmail users can add another 6GB of storage on top of the 2.8GB already offered (for free) through Gmail as well as the additional 1GB offered for Picasa. There are more storage options available, going up as high as 250GB for $500 per year. "When you reach the limit of free storage," writes Google Software QA engineer lead Ryan Aquino, "consider this your overflow solution."
At the same time, Microsoft announced that Windows Live SkyDrive—previously known as Windows Live Folders—has opened to the public. The free beta service offers up to 500MB of online storage for nearly anything, not just e-mail and web albums like Google's offering. With a revamped UI that integrates into Windows, users can drag and drop files and browse the public directories on the SkyDrives of other users. Brandon LeBlanc of the Windows Live Blog describes it as a personal hard drive on the Internet.
Finally, just this week, Apple also bumped the storage offered through its own service, .Mac, from 1GB to 10GB. The price of .Mac's overall subscription remained the same at $99 per year, but the service comes with a number of other tools such as Mac training, web hosting, and heavy desktop software integration.
All of these moves reflect a growing battle over online storage geared toward more average users. While storage services like Amazon S3 might seem simple to many of us, setting it up still seems like a daunting—or at least inconvenient—challenge to many less savvy users. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all hoping that their own approaches to integration will also seem like no-brainers to end users.
Indeed, they all offer something slightly different than the next: Google's storage doesn't (currently) allow the user to just upload files from his or her hard drive like Windows Live SkyDrive, while Microsoft's offering provides only a fifth of the storage offered by Google for free. Apple's .Mac provides the most default amount of storage out of the three but does so for the highest price, as there is no true "free" option for .Mac. If only we could combine them into one super-service that would provide Google-levels of storage with the ease of use found in SkyDrive or .Mac. Let the gDrive rumors commence (again!).
As competition heats up, it won't be surprising to see these services gain functionality and drop in price in order to compete more fiercely with each other, and we still believe that the gDrive is coming. For Microsoft and Google, the competition will be wide open, while Apple will continue to focus solely on Mac users, hoping they don't bail on .Mac for different pastures (especially Google's green, cozy Gmail). All of this pressure means that these companies will have to keep upping the ante, which only leads to better services for all of us.
In closing, don't forget about the all of the online backup tools that are also available. Joel reviewed the best online backup options recently and found a keeper.
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