Cloud Storage Services

Suddenly, lots of software big heads launches their own Cloud Storage Services.  Microsoft announced their SkyDrive couple days ago, and Google just launched its Google Drive today (apparently it's modified from original Google Docs).  It seems if you don't participate the battle, you will lost the game of cloud computing.  Although I don' t know why these big heads are eager to join the game, but it's really a good news for consumers to get a better deal.

I have used Dropbox since it was released in 2009.  It's so convenient for me that I just need to put any photo/docs to dropbox and then I can open them any devices I have (esp. iPad).  Although SugarSync is the one who pushed the idea to the market, it failed in its UX design, and this leads most people chose Dropbox.  When the story comes that you have great number of choices to use, it becomes more complicated to choose a good one (or good ones).  No one of them has sound solution to end-users.  Maybe it's because marketing strategy, maybe it's due to timing issue.  I don't know, but it do make things more complicated.

I personally think free storage space that these vendors provide is somehow sufficient to me.  So I list a simple comparison chart of these products.

                                 Free Storage Space         Dawbacks
Google Drive               5G                                   No Linux Client/No WP Client/iOS client coming soon
MS Live SkyDrive        7G / 25G*                      No Linux Client/No Android Client/OSX Client only supports Lion
Dropbox                     2G / 18G#                       initial storage space is very small, hard to increase storage space for free
Box.net                       5G / 50G$                      terrible UX, No Linux Client

* if you apply SkyDrive before 4/22/2012
# for every friend you successfully invite him/her to use dropbox, you will receive 500MB for bonus.  It's up to 18GB.
$ loin box.net with your iOS/Android device, you storage space will increase to 50GB

I would say, if you're a windows or Lion user, and use Windows phone/iPhone.  25GB SkyDrive is your best choice now.  But if you have various kinds of devices like me, limited-spaced Dropbox is still your only choice.  You can only invite as many friends as you can to increase the free space (but is it possible?  most people have dropbox account now!).  Maybe you're considering Google Drive.  Yes, it's integration with Google Doc is convenient if you use Google Docs heavily (like Dr. Freeh :p), Google Drive might be a good option.  But 5GB is still relatively small.  What more shame is, it doesn't support Linux as Google uses lots of components from open source communities.