AT&T Tech Support 360Report: Google hosted storage coming in a few months
Google's much-rumored online storage service should be available in a few months, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal late on Monday that cites unnamed sources.
The service would allow people to store any kind of data on Google servers and access it from any computer with an Internet connection. An unspecified amount of storage would be offered for free with additional amounts available for a fee, the report said.
Google spokespeople did not return calls seeking comment on the report. A spokeswoman for the search company reached by the newspaper declined to comment on any specific plans but said "storage is an important component of making Web (applications) fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives."
The news is hardly new and certainly not surprising. Rumors of a hosted storage offering from Google, dubbed "Gdrive," have circulated for a while.
The move would raise the stakes in Google's rivalry with Microsoft, whose productivity applications rule the desktop world. Google has been releasing hosted e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, calendar, and other programs that compete with Microsoft. While consumers are attracted to the online services of Google's, corporations have yet to sign up for security and functionality reasons.
Microsoft offers a hosted storage offering of its own, which it renamed Windows Live SkyDrive this summer and has readied Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing, but not editing, Office documents online.
Google executives espouse a digital world where people can access their data from anywhere in what is called "cloud computing."
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 and previously covered search, online advertising, and portals. E-mail Elinor.
Forget the tech race, Microsoft needs to hire Google's flacks.
sooner or later enter your business and KILL your business because Google:
1- Is armed with Billions of Dollars
2- Will send your listings way down in its search results compared to their own listings for the Keywords searched for related to this business
Google will do all these, that is enter business after business, and sooner or later KILL your
business because they have to Maximize sales & profits to justify their gargantuan stock
price & valuations.
So what is the answer? Thanks goodness that this is not the pre-Internet (Microsoft age)
where we could not do anything to Google/Microsoft of the world dominating market after market due
to their monopoly position in one market and as a result killing business after business.
We can do something this time, by supporting this search engine called anoox:
www.anoox.com
Because anoox is operated on a Not-profit-motivated basis, they deliver much lower cost of Advertising and they do not enter business after business. Also it is operated on an Open fashion, it is kind of like the ICANN of search engine business, you can read more about this here:
http://www.anoox.com/sep-overview.jsp
Also another thing that is really neat about anoox is that its search results are powered by the people, that is they are democratically generated.
Dont take me wrong Anoox is not perfect, but it is a much more friendly search engine alternative to business owners and search engine users.