

Google Reduce Prices For Online Storage (20GB for $5/year, etc.) - greyman
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/twice-storage-for-quarter-of-price.html

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

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greyman
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.

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

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greyman
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.

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psranga
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.

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riobard
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 ...

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sahaj
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.

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

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

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sahaj
i like to think it was because of something i said:
[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=3081...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=3081a91ff730c29b&hl=en)

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charlesmarshall
who has 16TB of email / photos?

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olegk
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.

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

