Google GShares?
By Pete Freitag
When I saw the title of this post: Google GShares I thought that Google was launching a network share file storage service like Xdrive.
The post had nothing to do with storage. But I think this is something Google will eventually do. Google claims that their storage cost is $2/GB/year (and that number will go down as storage costs decrease), and Xdrive charges $16.95/mo for 1 GB of storage. Xdrive is overpriced. You can get 5GB of storage for $5 a month (you can probably find it cheaper) from any old web host, and then use web drive ($40) to map a drive letter on windows. Google however with their low storage costs, and acres of bandwidth will be able to give away 1GB like they are doing with GMail. Xdrive was giving away 100mb accounts when they first started (they however discontinued that program).
With a Google personal storage service Google could offer the ability to Google your hard drive (well your google drive anyways), or provide web hosting. Both services could be paid for with ads (its probably not that hard for google to make $2/year/user). Even if they can't pay for it with ads I think a lot of people would pay $4/GB/year, or more as Xdrive's existence shows. This puts Rich Skrenta's article about a Google Operating System (kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system) into perspective.
Google GShares? was first published on May 13, 2004.