While Google has its critics, the company seems to be one tech firm that is constantly in tune with what the consumer wants.  In terms of service, Google generally doesn't waste time and effort cutting back or restricting its service, rather it simply strives to give the customer more. 

This kind of thinking has led the scarce stock shares of Google to reach an astronomical price of over $700 per share, and has led them to launch a new campaign to conquer the cell phone O.S. industry.

Now Google is preparing to quietly launch a new service, which both legitimizes previously existing internet software and improves upon it.  The service gives users free online storage space and many are dubbing it GDisk for short.  In the past applications exploit GMail's very high amount of free storage space and allowed you to store files on it like a hard drive (GMail currently features over 5 GB of storage).  Google's Picasa photo service also has allowed users to store up to 1 GB of pictures and other files.

Google is looking to take that concept and transform it into a full featured service independent from GMail.   The Wall Street Journal first broke the story about this development yesterday.

Google has not announced how much storage users will get, but it is safe to assume it will be more than GMail’s 5 GB.  It has been announced that additional space will be available in addition to the baseline amount, for a small fee.

The move will likely be expensive for Google, as it will require more storage infrastructure.  However, it seems a logical one.  The more information users store on the internet, the more they will be dependent on the internet and internet services in their daily computer usage.  In effect this will shift users away from the desktop OS environment, dominated by Microsoft and into the internet services realm, dominated by Google.

For the user it is an exciting idea too, as they get more free space to store or back up their files.

One sticky issue raised by the new development actually stems from an objective Google has for its new service -- to allow users to share their files with a friend, similar to shared space on a Local Area Network.  This will likely bring up unpleasant copyright issues for the company, whose subsidiary YouTube is already facing a bizarre legal onslaught from the rock-and-roller Prince.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is currently in talks with copyright holders about how to approach this issue and avoid more legal troubles.

While there are many issues to work out, many users will be very excited to put Google's newest free service to use when it comes out.