Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data
Google Inc. wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company's competition with Microsoft Corp.
Context & Ripple Effects
The plan lands four months after reports that Google, Microsoft and Apple were all quietly building online storage havens (Ars Technica, August 2007) — this is Google's move turning that rumor of a race into an explicit product strategy. The WSJ frames it as the long-speculated drive-based service, with syndicated coverage already attaching the "GDrive" name to it.
It also extends a line Google has been running against Microsoft since at least January 2006, when it announced video downloads and software that rivals Microsoft's, and its October 2007 push to boost its corporate e-mail service. Files-on-Google's-drives is the same logic applied to the consumer's personal data: pull the center of gravity off the Windows PC.
First-order effects
- Consumers would keep their files on Google's servers rather than their own hard drives, making Google's data centers the default home directory for ordinary users.
- Microsoft faces direct competition for the user's primary document store — the local disk its desktop software franchise depends on.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft must respond with its own hosted storage and web-based offerings or cede the consumer file locker, converting a desktop-software rivalry into a data-center one.
- Rival consumer web companies — Apple among them, per the August 2007 coverage — face pressure to match free or cheap remote storage as a baseline feature rather than a premium add-on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, computing shifts toward a web-centric model where applications and data live server-side, and the value moves from selling installed software to operating storage-and-service platforms.
- Personal storage becomes a commodity utility attached to advertising- or subscription-funded services, reshaping how software companies price and monetize consumer relationships.
The trend: Consumer file storage is migrating from the PC's hard drive to web-hosted services, with Google and Microsoft racing to own the user's data before the other does.