Windows Live SkyDrive Doubles Storage to 1GB, Still Can't Keep Up With Gmail

picture-227.pngpicture-231.pngMicrosoft doubled the online storage consumers can get for free in Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s hard to get excited about that when Gmail is already giving me 2.9 GB of storage, with more on the way—4GB by the end of the month, and 6GB by early January, according to one estimate.

Keep that free storage coming. We’ll use it.

Update: Since there’s been such a curiously strong reaction to this post (some of which I suspect is concerted), I’ll just clarify a few things. First of all, the original post—barely more than a paragraph long—is not meant as an in-depth review or article. It is an off-hand observation. Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes blog posts are like that.

The observation is that on the same day that SkyDrive doubled its storage to 1GB, Google also announced that the 2.9 GB of storage available on Gmail is going to continue to climb significantly (two days after the original post, for instance, it’s at 3.1 GB). Yes, I understand that Web-based file storage and Web-based e-mail are two different things. But as a consumer, that 2.9 GB (now 3.1 GB) of storage on Gmail is my point of reference, and it makes me wonder why SkyDrive is being so stingy. If I were a Hotmail (er, Windows Live Mail) user, I might have noted that SkyDrive cannot even keep up with its own sister e-mail service, which offers 5GB of storage.

Obviously, these are not apples-to-apples comparisons. There may be good reasons why an online file storage system cannot offer as much storage as an online e-mail system (other than the fact that it may be an orphan project starved of resources inside a large corporation). So it would be more fair to compare SkyDrive to other online file-storage services, like Xdrive (which offers 5GB of free storage) or MediaMax (which offers a whopping 25GB of free storage). Any way you slice it, SkyDrive still comes up lacking.