Google announced that you can now purchase extra storage that can be shared amongst all of your g-utilities, including gmail, Picasa, docs and spreadsheets and so on.  The price?  Well, it starts at an incredible $20 per year to bump you up to 6 gigabytes.  There is a graduated scale up to 250G which will run you $500 per year.

Without trying to sound absurd, I think that this is incredibly lame. In an era where the price of storage is dropping every quarter, where one of its competitors is offering “unlimited” email storage (although the storage doesn’t carry over to its ‘briefcase’), and where other Web2.0 offerings are offering similarly competitive products at a per-gigabyte price which is just as competitive (or more) with this, I just don’t see how this is anything but lame.

Yes, g-utility users now have the *option* of paying for more space, but that’s like giving car owners the *option* of paying for extra gas once they’ve driven the car off the parking lot.  There’s nothing special or innovative about that — and in fact, runs a little counter to the spirit of “holy shit” when Gmail first shattered the storage barriers about three years ago.

One does wonder if, with this move, Google is now running into a consolidative (?complacent) phase, where it feels happy with the kind of progress and inroads its made into online email, online docs and spreadsheets, and online pictures.  Although gmail isn’t leading the field when it comes to online email.  Nor is Picasa leading the field when it comes to online pictures.

For a company that is banking its future existence on the ability to sort, categorize, and make meaningful the world’s information — that is fairly robust in terms of its assets, brand, and equity — you would think they would try and remove all barriers to getting people to make that information available *to* google. And you would think that would mean, it wouldn’t, at least while it isn’t yet the leader in any one of those categories, because it isn’t … particularly to hard core / early adopters, who are going to be the *only* ones who are running into that limit at this stage in the game.

Google being short sighted? Trying to do a cash grab? Snubbing *its* faithful?

Or, maybe they have something else up their sleeve?

Heck, in this case, I think its a, b, c, but *not* d. Sorry, Google, this move is teh lame, and there’s no three ways of saying it.