I recently started a website to talk about Google Base.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison has been telling anyone who would listen that people can’t wait to divulge all their private information and trust some faceless corporation with limited liability and a stable of lawyers to keep it for them. He’s a huge proponent of computers without local storage. I think the people he knows and the people I know don’t know each other.

I remember when I could store my operating system, word processor program, all of my utilities, and all of my document files on a single 5.25″ floppy disk (360k). It was just as well that everything fit on one floppy, because many of the computers we had on our desks back then had just a floppy drive (no hard drive).

It wasn’t Bill Gates who drove the demand for ever larger hard drives; ordinary users did, although some of the blame (or credit) could go to programmers whose code was (is) woefully inefficient. Back when a 10M hard drive was the best you could buy, people queued up to lay down big bucks for them because people (at least the folks I know) LIKE to have their data physically present where they can control it. Witness the evolution of flash drives.

Yes Google is wonderful because it helps us all find what we’re looking for quickly and efficiently. But I don’t see folks (the ones I know) being ready to upload straight from their digital cameras to Google Base then deleting the files from their cameras. I predict that hard drives will continue to get larger rather than disappearing from our desktop computers.