One of the fastest growing markets in North America is storage as people look for places to store their “stuff” – most of it things they never/rarely use or need. (If you’ve ever moved and had to store your belongings for a few months, you know exactly what I mean!)
In the digital world, a growing number of people have too much stuff – photos, music, video, etc. – so Google has decided it’s a fertile/lucrative market to get into the online storage business. You can buy 6GB for $20/year, 25GB for $75, 100GB for $250 or 250GB for $500. My friend, Mathew Ingram, thinks the pricing is silly because online storage is virtually free these days. (In comparison, real life storage can be expensive, especially if you have a lot of stuff)
Judging by how many peoples’ GMail accounts (e.g. Jason Calacanis) are bulging at the seams, Google’s move seems like a no-brainer. The question is whether all those GMail users will upgrade to a premium package or simply create another GMail account and create their own storage facility using something like Gspace.
Read Write/Web has an overview on the storage market, including thoughts on Microsoft’s Live Sky Drive. (By the way, anyone notice Google’s Official Blog has 577,000 subscribers – making it a leading candidate to be the first blog with more than one million subscribers.)
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I am interested in the pricing strategy. It may be true that the storage may be virtually free, but transport costs are not. So if I upload an album to Picasa and my tons of buddies can be downloading it to watch them. So I am curious to know how to model the usage so that I can predict the incurred transmission cost. I am stumped on this point for an application that I am developing. My current thinking is that metered charge is more transparent.
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