This could be quite important. Google has slashed prices on the paid versions of Drive, its cloud storage product, seriously undercutting its Western competitors.
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In an official blog post, the internet giant announced that it would be slashing the cost of its monthly storage plans on Drive, to US$1.99 for 100GB (previously US$4.99), US$9.99 for 1TB (previously US$49.99), and US$99.99 for a 10TB drive, with the ability to increase that if necessary.
As TechCrunch’s Ferederic Lardinois notes, the move could spark a veritable storage war, with the likes of Dropbox and SugarSync seeking out equally cheap options. The move also leaves big competitors such Apple and Microsoft lagging way behind.
It also undercuts the costs of Google’s own developer storage platform as well as those of Amazon’s S3 and Microsoft’s Azure storage platforms. What the essentially means is that Google giving people the kind of personal cloud storage that has previously only been available to specialised cloud storage companies (Dropbox for instance, uses Amazon S3).
The cloud storage battle set to occur with these companies is, however, small fry compared to what’s been going on in China. There, a number of companies are giving users 1TB of storage for free, with Tencent offering domestic and international users 10TB of free storage, although they aren’t allowed to access it all at once.
