Google finally getting into data backup!?!
With their latest announcement to host any type of files on Google Docs, Google is foraying into the arena of "your data in the cloud, access, organize, share - anytime from anywhere" business that we have been envisioning from a long time (over 4 years now!).
What's interesting is the approach that google has taken. Instead of traditional approach of building all the features that are geared towards providing this product vision from ground up and releasing the end product, Google has built seemingly independent product and tested the waters first. And once the users have accepted each of those individual pieces reasonably well, they are integrating them all to provide a powerful experience. (Privacy conspiracy theorist may say this is much like boiling a frog in the water slowly!).
Interestingly enough, Google's price of storage per GB seems to be the cheapest at the moment at $0.25/GB/year. But their initial free offering is just 1 GB with 250MB file size limit. At this price, it seems cheaper than amazon. And as expected for a end user product, there are no transfer charges (bandwidth costs). In comparison, Microsoft SkyDrive offers 25 GB free space with 50MB file size limit.
Even though Google doesn't have it's own backup client that can run on your desktop like traditional backup clients, I'm sure, given their good data apis available to 3rd party developers, there will be many cropping up like mushrooms.
Surely this will change the market for good in the long term. Let's see how the traditional backup companies (including us) will react to this.
What's interesting is the approach that google has taken. Instead of traditional approach of building all the features that are geared towards providing this product vision from ground up and releasing the end product, Google has built seemingly independent product and tested the waters first. And once the users have accepted each of those individual pieces reasonably well, they are integrating them all to provide a powerful experience. (Privacy conspiracy theorist may say this is much like boiling a frog in the water slowly!).
Interestingly enough, Google's price of storage per GB seems to be the cheapest at the moment at $0.25/GB/year. But their initial free offering is just 1 GB with 250MB file size limit. At this price, it seems cheaper than amazon. And as expected for a end user product, there are no transfer charges (bandwidth costs). In comparison, Microsoft SkyDrive offers 25 GB free space with 50MB file size limit.
Even though Google doesn't have it's own backup client that can run on your desktop like traditional backup clients, I'm sure, given their good data apis available to 3rd party developers, there will be many cropping up like mushrooms.
Surely this will change the market for good in the long term. Let's see how the traditional backup companies (including us) will react to this.
