Google Reduce Prices For Online Storage (20GB for $5/year, etc.) | Hacker News Reader

Google Reduce Prices For Online Storage (20GB for $5/year, etc.)

googleblog.blogspot.com

20 pointsgreyman19 comments

It seems that they can crush Dropbox anytime, they just need a cross platform "rsyncing" client and a UI

As a dropbog alternative, I use Live Mesh from MSFT - 5GB storage and possibility to sync more folders.

Regarding the Google offer: It seems to me that the storage can be (currently) used only for photos (picasaweb) and gmail. It doesn't look bad, but I would still prefer to pay price for bandwidth per year. If I have to use this as a backup for all my photos in original res., 20GB is not enough, so the Flickr's unlimited storage for $25 still looks better.

For me, the OK price would be $5-$10 per 20GB upload bandwidth/year.

I'm using SpiderOak which gives you 2GB free, but you can get an additional 1GB for each free referral, for a total of up to 5GB free. You get a 'zero-knowledge knowledge environment' (everything's encrypted on the client-side before upload, and they can't even see the file names or other meta-data). You can use an unlimited number of devices, sync folders between machines, no special 'dropbox' folder is required, share folders with others, and use their web interface (though I'm not sure what the implications of using that are on the 'zero-knowledge environment'...I don't know how they've designed that).

Does Live Mesh support Mac and Linux because if not it isn't so much a competitor to Dropbox.

I just said that I use it as an alternative, since I use Windows. So it is a competitor for PC+Windows users, if you want me to be more exact.

It does support Macs. It's got an API so hopefully someone will build other clients, like for Linux.

Of course they could.

But they'd have to want to be in that market and then to provide a better UI and functionality set than the existing system.

And would they make enough money off of it to be worth investing their time in? Probably not.

That's a pretty big "just"

they won't; both serve different needs.

dropbox is mainly used by people who don't use webapps to manage their documents and photos.

Very interesting development.

This illustrates one risk for companies built on the idea of outsourcing infrastructure to Amazon AWS (Smugmug, Dropbox etc). You better add much more value on top of AWS, otherwise a Google/Microsoft can undercut you big-time on price.

My perception is that they haven't dropped prices enough although hardware has become much better (1 GHz equivalent machine as baseline?, I built a quad-core machine for $600 and got a 1TB drive for less than $100).

Google's move definitely validates my hunch.

I was thinking about getting a Smugmug account, but now I will probably use a Google account.

This is pretty useless for anyone not using Picasa. I cannot "sync" my iPhoto library easily. The Picasa Web Album Uploader sucks.

Still hope they can give us gDrive ...

don't use the web album uploader; use picasa to manage your photos. it's as easy as clicking a button if you are using picasa 3.0.

Anyone know of a developer API you could use to take advantage of this offer? Ala gspace possibly?

Does this offer have a trick? Can I host non-image files? API access for read and write?

i like to think it was because of something i said: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=3081...

who has 16TB of email / photos?

I'm a semi-professional photographer, and I have around 3TB of photos. Pros can easily hit 16TB in a year or two.

HD videos are much much worse.

The main problem is how to upload all that stuff. Even at 20 mbit it would take 77 days to upload 16TB.

(16 terabytes) / (20 (megabit per second)) = 77.63 days

How many people have that kind of upload speed? I certainly don't.

Good point, with the newer slrs doing 720p video that would eat a big chunk ..

Perhaps not, but you can ship a physical drive to Amazon and they will put it into the cloud for you.

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