Will Gmail Now Lead To An Online Storage Revolution?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the I-see-your-1-gig-and-raise-you... dept

People keep submitting these random stories about yet another web email offering with 1 gig or more of storage as if that’s a story worth posting. It really isn’t. However, Jeremy Wagstaff has pointed out that that Gmail’s decision (and the resulting snowball effect from other email providers) may change the economics of the online storage business as well. Who needs to pay for a measly 100 MB of online storage space when you can just send it all to Gmail? In fact, he notes, that Xdrive is getting ready to up their online storage space to 5 gigs. It seems that these providers may also want to branch out towards offering more advanced services. For example, I already use an offsite backup service which will automatically backs up data from my hard drive to a remote backup location. I have 4 gigs of space through that company, but I’m not really paying for the storage space as much as I’m paying for the service of automatic backups. So, basically, the storage element becomes less of an issue, and the services and applications on top of the storage may become more of a focus. Gmail is really about email (despite the storage ability) while another service may be about backups. Others could be about file sharing (legal or illegal, I guess) or the ability to create a shared archive… or whatever other kind of application you can build when storage is a lot less limited than with most online applications today. Right now, many applications limit the amount of data that can be stored, but Google may have broken down those doors, and basically have said online storage shouldn’t be a limiting factor any more.