Google, Microsoft and Apple building online storage havens: you win
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 …
Context & Ripple Effects
As of mid-August 2007 there is little prior arc in our corpus — this report is the starting gun, not a chapter in an ongoing race. What it captures is convergence: Google, Microsoft and Apple are all separately confirmed to be developing online storage offerings meant to hold user data on their own servers.
The strategic logic stated in the piece is retention rather than storage for its own sake — data kept on a vendor's servers keeps users returning to that vendor's other services. Cloud computing as a full model is described as still far off; storage is the wedge each company is betting on first.
First-order effects
- Users gain free or cheap remote storage from three competing platform owners, with the immediate cost of keeping files on Google, Microsoft or Apple hardware dropping toward zero.
- Each of the three vendors gets a direct retention hook: once a user's documents, photos and settings live on one company's servers, that user's next PC, phone, or web search decision is biased toward the same company.
Second-order effects
- Storage parity becomes table stakes among the three — any richer storage offer from one forces Google, Microsoft and Apple to match it, turning gigabytes into a marketing number much as processor speeds once were.
- PC makers and smaller storage-software vendors face pressure as the default destination for personal files shifts from the local hard drive to whichever platform vendor owns the account.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal data concentrates on a handful of vendor server farms, making those companies the de facto custodians of consumer digital life — which positions storage today as the foundation layer for broader hosted-computing services tomorrow, and eventually draws regulator attention to portability and custody of user data.
The trend: Personal computing is migrating from locally stored files to vendor-hosted storage as the default, with the three platform companies using data residency as the primary lock-in mechanism.