Google slashed the costs of hosted storage for its Picasa
and Gmail applications, offering 20 gigabytes (GB) of storage for $5 per year, or twice
as much for one quarter of the previous price.
For perspective, that's enough storage for 10,000
high-resolution photos taken with a 5 megapixel camera. For more perspective, Google's
storage costs as recently as January 2009 was $20 for 10 GB -- not bad, but a relative drop in the bucket
compared to Google's latest cut.
When Google introduced the extra storage option in August
2007, it cost $20 per year for 6 GB. Google Operating System has the present and past breakdowns in price here.
Will users begin entrusting more e-mail and photos to Google
server farms? It's hard to say, but certainly cutting storage costs for its
Picasa photo-sharing and Gmail applications is a sign the cloud computing
market is maturing.
Gmail users currently get 7 GB for
free, while Picasa users enjoy 1 GB gratis. Google engineer Elvin Lee noted
that when Gmail launched five years ago, it came with one GB of
storage, but people manage to use up their 7 GB, leading Google to
offer more storage. Picasa users used up their 1 GB of free space as
they started taking more pictures and moving
full resolution backups of their photo collection into the cloud.
In fact, while Google's standard storage overflow
offerings range to one terabyte for $256 per year, the company is pledging to support users for up to 16 terabytes, at $4,096 per year. Call it a
cloud of one's own.
EWeek pressed Google on reasons for the cost cuts. Was it
a competitive gesture? After all, Google's cut came one days after Cisco Nov. 9
launched its Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail app for $3.50 per user per month
with 5 GB of storage, and one week after Microsoft trimmed prices on its Business Productivity Online Suite from $15 to $10 per month.
A Google spokesperson said:
"The technology continually increases in efficiency -and
this progress is one of the main things that facilitate the movement to the
cloud. Google engineers have been working on improving our infrastructure to
reduce costs and pass the savings to users, and we're dramatically lowering our
prices to make Google paid storage even more affordable."
Of course, a little competition from Cisco, Microsoft and IBM, which
last month launched Lotus iNotes for $36 per year, helps keep Google on its
toes.
These are new threats not only to Gmail, but to Google's broader
Google Apps platform, which staked a claim in the cloud three years ago for
businesses.
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