Information about G-Drive leaked out from a presentation kept on google site. The idea is not entirely new, some vendors e.g. godaddy.com (largest domain registrar, and web hosting provider) provides an online folder service. It costs from $5 to $10 a month depending on storage, which starts 1 GB onwards. If coming from google's stable, however, one would expect a scale and usability of a different order.

To an extent, the google presentation said it in terms of applications of online storage, rather than just storage. Saving files, pictures, and even a backup service in case of PC failure were some of the said applications. Keeping aside bandwidth constraints, and privacy concerns for now, here is an analysis of who might benefit and be willing to pay for this service. We try to divide the home PC user’s population into two extremes, for sake of simplicity.

1. Infrequent PC Users, who are happier accessing their emails on webmail without downloading, so they do not lose them. They probably access others' data and websites, than generating a lot of data of their own.

2. Power Users, who download emails, create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, save pictures on PC as well upload to a web site. They need to backup their data on PC, and also would like to access it anywhere else. They may be savvy in PC usage, but it is debatable how many regularly back up and manage their data. Now there are solutions to allow remote access to home users' PC, but that leads to more complexity not all users would be comfortable with. Of course, for business use VPN based remote access is becoming more common.

From my experience of web hosting and saving pictures on website, online storage has one great advantage of automatically providing a safe backup of data, provided of course the web hosting account is kept alive. The caveat is that while I may be comfortable putting some pictures on website (those were meant for public consumption anyway), I would not be comfortable putting documents for privacy reasons (so we did come back to privacy even though I said we won't).

Since remote access to computer is possible for savvy and business users, online storage has to be targeted to home users, and ease of use should be compelling - anything less than drag and drop is not compelling enough. Then again it should be able to provide an experience which changes the way people use PC, e.g., what google did for search. Something less than that will get some of the power users hooked onto service, but those users do not make the mass market of infrequent PC users.