• GigaOm, Monday, February 2, 2009 11:45 AM

The blogosphere has been blogging and twittering about GDrive, a new online storage service from Google that will apparently come bundled with Google Pack, the company's downloadable software that includes products like Picasa and Google Earth. GigaOm's Om Malik opines that Google's entry into "what is essentially a commodity business" with ad revenues that would "represent little more than a drop in Google's overall business bucket," is more about reaching out to corporate customers than day-to-day consumers. Like Google Apps and Gmail before it, Malik thinks that Google is taking this one to the general public before its corporate customers.

"My guess would be that they would marry GDrive storage with Google Apps and other applications, such as Google Talk," Malik writes. "In doing so they'd create a virtual 'computing environment' in the cloud." Indeed, what was once put on a disk is now housed in an online storage locker. The Web is the operating system, and the computer processor and memory are all housed in Google's data centers. Anywhere you have a screen and a connection you have access to your company.

"From a strategic standpoint, I marvel at Google's game plan," says Malik. "From a personal standpoint, however, I don't like it a bit." Google's products might be "really good", but being this dependent on one company is a scary proposition. "My fundamental belief is that as companies get too big and too powerful, they start doing anti-consumer things because they have a much larger revenue stream to protect," writes Malik, "and while Google might come across as cute and cuddly today, they are, in reality, a monopoly. Giving such an entity unfettered access to my desktop and my data makes me uneasy."

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