Online storage will become a necessity

The news this week that Microsoft Live is now offering 500MB of online storage via its Skydrive service and that Google will allow Gmail users to extend their 1GB of storage with a fee-based storage offering makes me wonder what’s going on.

I have to disagree with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, who says Google’s move is “purely about money.” It is certainly not about increasing revenues for these companies — at least not in the immediate future.

But by looking at it from the perspective of “what does this really mean?” we might discover a strategic move in these storage announcements. We might, if you read between the lines, see that these companies are also making a declaration of where they believe high tech is headed.

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, just to name three, all have online storage facilities. For free or for a fee, why do they bother?

The answer for me is that these companies see digital’s future, and it encompasses dozens of different kinds of mobile and nonmobile digital devices, perhaps better called “digital opportunities,” proliferating.

As inexpensive as storage gets, and the prices seem to drop continually for both rotating disk and solid state storage, companies realize that it would be impractical to store whatever it is you want to store uniquely every time a device or an interface invites you to save data.

Rather, universal storage somewhere in the cloud that allows a user to just click on the save button and have it all go to one place makes a lot more sense.

So Microsoft can give you 500MB of free storage, Yahoo can give you unlimited free storage for the time being, and Google can start getting you used to paying for it, but all of them, I believe, see a digital future filled with dozens of opportunities for digital storage.

As this slowly evolves, what seems like a fifth wheel today — the need for online storage — will become an essential integrated part of our lives tomorrow.