HUA HIN, Thailand - Google has
announced another service this week in an attempt
to draw more of the world's population into its
ecosystem and create the globe's largest digital
filing cabinet. The concept of an online storage
locker for personal photos, videos, music and
documents is not a new one so Google Drive will be
entering an already crowded cloud marketplace.
The service will compete with Apple's
iCloud, Microsoft's SkyDrive, and DropBox, which
all offer both free and paid online storage. It
comes in quite competitive though, with seven
gigabytes of free storage, 100Gb for US$60 per
year, and up to 1 terabyte for $50 per month.
Apple offers only 5Gb free and a maximum of 55Gb
for $110 per year, Microsoft also offers 7Gb free
and 107Gb for only $50 per year making it the best
value.
Google Drive will have implemented
search technology allowing
users to scan through a
wide variety of documents including Adobe PDFs.
Google Docs will be heavily integrated allowing a
seamless transition for those already using
Google's services and easy collaboration of work
between other people using the same service.
Google Drive is solely cloud based, so
would not be suitable for those with slow or
unreliable Internet connections or those that want
to work offline. It also raises some important
privacy and security issues regarding the
policies, terms of service and rules put in place
by Google, or any cloud storage provider, for your
documents.
This is something people do not
have to worry about when they store files on their
own computers - it is their own responsibility to
back them up and secure their machine.
Google states that you own your files but
also hidden in its lengthy legalese and terms and
conditions is the following clause:
When you upload or otherwise submit
content to our Services, you give Google (and
those we work with) a worldwide license to use,
host, store, reproduce, modify, create
derivative works (such as those resulting from
translations, adaptations or other changes we
make so that your content works better with our
Services), communicate, publish, publicly
perform, publicly display and distribute such
content.
Tech blogs and Twitter users
reacted to this clause quickly by stipulating that
any content uploaded would automatically become
the intellectual property of Google Inc.
Users may want to familiarize themselves
with these rules and policies before being so
eager to click "agree" to cloud computing,
especially with a company that derives 97% of its
revenue from advertising and heavily profiling the
users of its services.
Industry Google executive
chairman Eric Schmidt testified this week that the
company developed Android without using the
intellectual property of Sun's Java platform as
accused by Oracle in their ongoing legal battle
(See Oracle
threat to Android, April 21, 2012).
The former CEO told jurors in San
Francisco that Sun Microsystems did not object to
the then development of Google's mobile operating
system, which Oracle is gunning for. Schmidt was
Sun's chief technology officer before joining
Google and was with Sun when it created the Java
platform in the 1990s. Oracle bought out Sun and
the Java patents and copyrights in 2010 and is now
seeking a big payout.
Schmidt told the
court that Google had once hoped to partner with
Sun to develop Android. An agreement could not be
made as Google wanted the platform to be open
source and Sun was unwilling to relinquish control
over Java.
A key issue in the case is
whether the application programming interfaces
(APIs) can be copyrighted, Google argues no
because they are an essential part of the Java
programming language, which both sides agree is
freely available for use. The language is of no
use without the ability to make something happen,
which is what the API does, according to Schmidt.
Estimates of Oracle's early damages claim
have been reduced from over US$6 billion to around
a $1 billion as Google has succeeded in
overturning five of the seven patent claims by
forcing the patent office to take a second look.
Invalid patent claims are becoming a
digital thorn in the side of the technology
industry as companies seeking huge payouts from
others deprive them of funds which could be spent
on research and development. Aside from Google and
Oracle there are dozens more going through the
courts involving the likes of Apple, Facebook,
Yahoo, Samsung, Motorola, LG and HTC.
Telecoms China's boom market is
now responsible for 20% of all Apple's sales - the
company generated $12.4 billion in revenue from
the country for the first half of its financial
year. China has around a billion mobile phone
users, an estimated 10% of them on high-speed 3G
connectivity.
In the second quarter last
year Apple generated 43.4% of its revenue from the
US and now that take has fallen to 37.9% with the
Asia Pacific’s share up from 22.1% to 29.2% , led
by China. Apple contributed the growth in China to
the launch of its latest iPhone in February and
the addition of China Telecom as a partnered
carrier in March. China and the world's largest
wireless carrier, China Mobile, still doesn't
offer contracts with the iPhone.
The
healthy China and Asia Pacific figures helped
restore investor confidence following a slowdown
in Apple sales growth in the US.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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