Meet Cloud Picker, Google's Stealthy New Storage Product
What is Google Cloud Picker? According to these Blogger Forums, Sites Forums, and others, Google has been testing a new online storage tool called, you guessed it, Cloud Picker. — From these accounts, it appears that the tool …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cloud Picker is the latest turn in a Google storage thread that goes back years: as early as September 2007, observers spotted evidence of GDrive inside Google Apps, and this week's reports — surfacing through Blogger and Sites help forums rather than any official announcement — show the company quietly testing a consumer-facing online storage tool under a new name.
The timing matters because it lands in the same week as two other signals from Google: a confirmed acquisition of Widevine driven by rising demand for on-demand video streaming, and rumors of a Google-branded Chrome OS netbook reportedly launching December 7th. A storage layer is the common denominator across all three.
First-order effects
- Forum users who encounter Cloud Picker become an informal test cohort, giving Google real-world usage data on a consumer storage product before any official launch or pricing is announced.
Second-order effects
- If the rumored December 7th Chrome OS netbook is real, Cloud Picker's kind of cloud storage becomes the substitute for local disk on that hardware — and the Widevine deal points the same stack at streamed video, where storage and delivery need to work together.
Third-order effects
- The arc from a 2007 GDrive sighting to an unannounced 2010 test suggests Google treats consumer storage less as a standalone product than as infrastructure underneath its own devices and media ambitions — a posture competitors without an OS or browser of their own find harder to match.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is shifting from a named product you buy into a default layer beneath operating systems, devices, and streaming media.