Google’s New Online Storage Deal: Much Cheaper, But Not a Game Changer

Google is so synonymous with free stuff that it’s easy to forget that it does indeed offer some for-pay services–such as additional online storage space for Gmail messages and Picasa photos. Yesterday, it announced that it’s slashing the fees it charges for extra elbow room.

The new pricing starts at $5 a year for 20GB of space, and go up to $4,096 (!) for 16TB (!!). These fees only matter after you’ve used up all the service’s free space–7GB+ for Gmail, and 1GB for Picasa–and there’s no discount as you buy more capacity. No matter which plan you get, you’re paying a quarter a gigabyte. Until yesterday, the company was charging $20 a year for 10GB, or $2 a gigabyte, or eight times as much.

Google had maintained the old price for two years, during which the cost of hard disks has nosedived, so to some extent the new pricing is just catching up with economic reality. The company says that the new cost is similar to what you’d pay per gigabyte for an external drive. But while it’s true that you’ll pay around a quarter a gig for something like a Seagate FreeAgent drive, you’re buying the drive and renting your Google space. Over three years, the FreeAgent’s total cost per gig remains a quarter, while you’ll have paid 75 cents a gig to Google.

(Not that I’m complaining: I remember paying $250 for a 500MB hard drive–or $500 a gigabyte–in the mid 1990s.)

How do the new prices compare with competitive Web services? It’s kind of hard to do the math. Yahoo, for instance, says that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free; unlimited free storage for Flickr is $25 a year. Online storage services such as Box.net and  SugarSync charge way more than Google does, but let you use their space for files of all sorts, and offer lots more features.

Ultimately, the target audience for Google online storage in its current form isn’t gigantic. You gotta think that the percentage of Gmail users who need more than 7GB of space is tiny, and that most Picasa users can make do with 1GB. (Picasa continues to feel like it’s aimed at newbies–the most hardcore photo shares I know tend to use Flickr or SmugMug.) What would really change everything would be Google rolling out the mythical Gdrive–a true hard drive in the sky–at the prices it’s charging for Gmail and Picasa. I’m guessing we will see Gdrive someday, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll show up or how much storage you’ll get, at what price.

(And sorry, but I’m still sitting here slackjawed at Google’s 16TB-for-$4,096 pricing plan. Wonder how big the market is for that?)

Microsoft’s New “Apple Tax” Charts: Hey, They Look Familiar!

After I finished writing about the oddities and errors in the white paper Microsoft released today about the so-called “Apple Tax,” I read a post on the same topic by Joe Wilcox over at eWeek. He said the charts in the paper, which is credited to Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies, looked vaguely familiar. They did to me, too. So I dug through my e-mail to find the stuff Microsoft had sent me in the past about Windows PC and Mac pricing,

Here’s a chart that a Microsoft representative sent me back on October 24th, comparing the MacBooks against Windows laptops (sorry it’s so small):

And here’s the laptop comparison chart in the new white paper:

This is a chart on Mac and Windows desktops that Microsoft sent me on January 5th, when it and the world thought Apple might announce one or more cheap new Macs at Macworld Expo (it didn’t):

And here’s the desktop chart in the white paper:

Both charts have gotten updates–for instance, the new laptop one has the $999 MacBook with a DVD burner (which is right, even though it’s not the $999 MacBook configuration you’ll buy today) and some of the PCs are different.

I’m not saying there’s anything fishy going on here–maybe Microsoft hired Endpoint to create the charts and analysis it sent out earlier, but didn’t credit it that time.  But it’s worth noting that the new charts aren’t really new–they’re updates (albeit insufficiently updated ones) to ones that Microsoft was distributing under its own name several months ago. And Kay’s argument that the cost of Apple-brand networking equipment and a Sony Blu-Ray player is a penalty Mac owners must pay is also repeated from another round of materials that a Microsoft representative sent me on October 13th.

Bottom line: The white paper is a rehash, not a revelation…

Secrets of Managing your Flip Video Collection

[David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling production company that specializes in live event production. He also blogs and does a daily radio report for Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco at Spark Minute.]

If you use a Flip video camera like I do, (here’s a photo of my Mino HD with a design of my company logo on it) you probably also have quite a collection of videos that are being managed with their video management software. If you have the old Flip Video software, you should upgrade to the new FlipShare software for free. It does much better management of your videos and it’s considerably faster.

But when I installed the FlipShare program it moved all my videos! The “My Flip Video Library” is still there and all the folders I created in the Flip Video program are there as well, but all the videos are gone. All that’s left in each folder is a video that says, “The videos which were previously located in this folder have been imported into the NEW FlipShare software. To view or edit your videos, open the new software.”

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