| Store Wars 5: The Empire strikes back! |
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| Monday, 24 April 2006 | |
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Deep in the heart of Washington State, half a world away, 147 miles from Seattle, lies a little farming community of about 5000 called Quincy. One thing the surrounding region apparently is not short of is land, cheap power and fat communications pipes. So it is quite understandable to hear that the evil empire Microsoft has chosen this region, not too distant from its home base, as a beach head for its counter-offensive against the rebellious insurgent Google. In the online digital age, the name of the game is storage. Consumers demand it in increasing quantities. Right now it's digital music, photos and data. Soon it will be vast collections of movie length high definition videos requiring terabytes of storage. At present, most of us keep all our data stored on local hard drives. However, in an age where we are beginning to demand access to our digital property at anytime from anywhere and from any device this does not make sense. What does make sense is to pay someone a small amount to keep all that data stored in a safe place. The upstart cyberspace insurgent Google has known the store score for some time, which is why a couple of years ago it launched its Gmail free email service giving users a generous allocation of 1Gb of data to play with. Meanwhile, the stingy evil empire Microsoft was caught napping with its Hotmail service giving users a paltry and barely usable 2Mb. However, Emperor William Gates the nerd, flanked by trusted executioner Lord Ballmer and battle strategist Ozzie the ray, have hit upon the ultimate weapon to thwart the designs of the valiant cyber knights Sirs Brin and Page. The plan is to use the empire's inexhaustible resources to build a digital storage facility like the planet has never seen. This facility would have enough storage to engulf the entire earth’s digital assets. Then give away as much storage as is desired to the centres of learning which house the younglings. "Let the younglings see the light," say the masters of the empire. "Get them used to our brand without the ads. Then once they go out into the world fully familiarised with the ways of our system, we will charge them for what they once had for free and make them understand that ads keep the service affordable." Thus, we see the empire striking back at Google, building massive storage server farms, first at places like Quincy, then perhaps elsewhere around the world. But wait! Google already has its own massive storage server farms, it also has considerable resources and it also has designs on the education market. So the Store Wars saga has really just begun. The first four episodes of the saga were really quite boring, but episode six looks like it's shaping up to be a thriller.{moscomment}
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