Online space has undergone tremendous revolution in the last few years with the introduction of multiple file hosting sites and also with email accounts going unlimited with their storage.

With music and video creation and disemmination being on the rise with youtube and now the indian rediff ishare the file sizes are also increasing.

So in middle of all this unlimited and free storage available Gmail (google’s 2.8 GB email service) announced extra storage for a price. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. This could be taken to supplement the 2.8 Gb of free storage in Gmail or the 1GB free storage in Picassa the online picture organising tool.

So if Google on one end is charging customers for storage Microsoft is offering free storage both through its mail and an hosting service called Skydrive. Let talk about the mail first. Hotmail which is usually the last one to react to storage increases by other players has increased its mail account storage to 5GB which is almost twice the size of Gmail. Though if one wants more than 5 GB of storage one can get 10GB storage space for $19.99 a year.

Now lets come to Skydrive. Windows Live SkyDrive is an online storage service using which users can store up to 500MB of data, for free. According to Microsoft, SkyDrive can store about 100 songs, 1,000 Office documents or 3,000 high-resolution digital photos. Krishna Prasad, head of programming, MSN India and Windows Live, said, “Once we start people using this service, we could offer higher services. We will watch the product for three to six months and then decide.” Currently Skydrive is available to US and UK users of Microsoft.

I feel this is war brewing between the two giants of the online world when it comes to online storage space as more and more users are storing pictures, videos, presentations online. I infact store a lot of my information on gmail (By emailing files to myself) as its accessible anywhere through internet. I think the move to charge users would take some time to take off as currently in India it seems not many would pay for extra storage but as users become more and more web enabled in india i see a good opportunity in the online storage market coupled with a good usability experience in storing and sharing files.

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