The big G is entertaining the idea of offering consumers (that’s you) the ability to store files online on their servers. Many bloggers around the web have dubbed this "GDrive". Whether that will be the actual name is uncertain at this point.

For those who have been using the internet a long time, you probably remember similar offerings (not from Google) back in the dot-com boom of the late 90′s and early 2000′s. And we all know what happened when that bubble burst. Bye-bye, files. It wasn’t pretty.

One can only hope there isn’t a repeat performance of what happened with online storage years ago.

While the GDrive offering would heat up the competition between Microsoft and Google, MS isn’t the only game in town concerning online storage with its SkyDrive. You’ve got Omnidrive, Box.net and XDrive (AOL) too.

The one thing none of the other guys have is being branded as a Google product. Like it or not, when the big G puts something to market, people usually pay attention.

For those that ask "Shouldn’t Google have launched something like this already?", the answer is that there are legal issues when it comes to online file storage. Namely, who owns the files once hosted remotely? Do they belong to you at that point or to the service provider? Who has access to your files besides you?

These are all valid questions yet to be answered at this point concerning the big G’s future offering.

But we’ll be watching to see what happens.

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