Syuhada on Social Computing

Google Storage, anyone?

The Official Google Blog and the Official Google Docs Blog have announced 1GB of free online storage for files that you are not obliged to convert it into one of the not-quite-Office-compatible Google Docs formats (ie Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). This is as the same as the amount of space GMail offered at launch and this is way lower than what Microsoft offers with their Windows Live SkyDrive. Of course like the blog said that we can add more spaces with "only" $0.25 per year for an extra gigabyte but it's still way long to go to match 25 GB.

The synchronization support is also one of SkyDrive's advantage as you can easily save your Office 2010 files to the cloud, while I really don't think you can do it with Google storage. In the other hands, Google storage integrates well with Picassa and GoogleDocs and you can upload up to 250MB per file (while SkyDrive limited to only 50MB).

But let's talk with honest. Do you own Windows Live or Hotmail account? These days people are moving away from Hotmail and they create Google Account. Google, Twitter, and Facebook is NOW. What Google is offering now for the online storage may be insufficient but they have the infrastructure, they have what they need to succeed.

So I guess the rivalry continues, it's up to you to choose. You can choose Google Storage with their space limitation or you can choose Microsoft's SkyDrive which gives you more spaces and seamless integration with Office 2010 (but I think they need to use Facebook Connect or Twitter login because not everybody has Live account, just kidding...) or you probably want to see more options on the net like DropBox, Box.Net, or other online storage services around.