The industry's two giants have announced their new products in the networked storage world

In any case, only a certain number of consumers and businesses are willing to store their data in a public cloud, but that does not hamper competition. But if the same standards that led to the collapse of Megaupload are implemented, or if service providers continue to trample on the user's trust, the market will be in trouble.

A few days ago, the industry's two giants announced their latest offerings in networked storage. First Microsoft launched the SkyDrive, which provides users with 7GB of free storage space, can be closely integrated with Office network applications, Microsoft also promised SkyDrive service will support Windows 8 Metro. Shortly thereafter, Google announced the launch of the long-awaited Google Drive Service, which provides 5GB of free storage space for users and can be tightly integrated with Google Apps.

Microsoft and Google are sure to make some hesitant users and businesses more confident about public cloud storage services, but they are hard pressed to dominate the market. Enumerate the public cloud storage services available on the market today, including icloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, SpiderOak, etc. And each service has a certain number of supporters.

In fact, cloud storage is not a new concept. Google launched its g-drive service in 2004. The predecessor of Dropbox and SkyDrive, Windows Live folders, started providing services as early as 2007. Google launched its Google Docs in 2010. But we have never seen a decent promotional campaign.

I don't think box, SugarSync or SpiderOak will lose the competition in the short term. In fact, each of the public cloud storage services have their own market. SpiderOak can encrypt data and do not retain keys. Box wants to challenge SharePoint in the Enterprise user domain. SugarSync supports all mobile platforms, even Symbian, and it has features that many other cloud storage services do not. But it is hard for me to imagine that these 3 services will be greatly developed and that they may be more likely to integrate with other services.

Dropbox has a number of useful third-party applications, but its advantages don't last long because all Third-party application developers are actively developing one-stop apps to support Google Drive and SkyDrive.

If Cloud Drive wants to compete as a stand-alone cloud storage service, it needs to be better known and to have an effective advertising campaign. Now it prides itself on being associated with Amazon's book and music storage services and the Kindle. But Amazon may just want to use the service to serve the Kindle customer.

The rest is icloud, and it will only add to the icing on the apple. Icloud's positioning is distinctive and is clearly an advanced service. Even if you don't want to think of it as a premium service, it can be better integrated with all of Apple's products. With Apple's current strength, icloud will certainly benefit a lot.

But for many cloud storage providers, there is a lot of potential trouble.

The file upload/hosting business was hit hard when the Justice Department shut down Megaupload's server in Hong Kong and arrested the company's founder Kindotkam Kim Dotcom in New Zealand. Megaupload's team has developed a set of ecosystems that violate U.S. copyright laws, but the core of the company's business is the ability to upload copyrighted material, retrieve URLs that directly point to those materials, and publish the Web site to anyone.

So far, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, box, and SugarSync have the same functionality, and they will be able to upload files and generate URLs to the file. The sender can send the URL to anyone, but also can set the password, and the user who receives the website does not need to register the account or log in to download to the related file. SpiderOak also has a similar feature called Sharerooms and supports folder operations.

If Megaupload's tort is so alarming that it requires Interpol, what standards should these other cloud-storage companies implement? There is only one line between cloud storage and file sharing. Do Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Box, SugarSync and SpiderOak need to check the files uploaded by users to make sure that they don't violate copyright? Do they have to use a content-ID system similar to YouTube's content-checking system? If so, the inventor of the content ID Google will have a big advantage in this area.

Finally, I think the online storage marketplace will not depend on functionality, but on user trust. Google's drive of its terms of service has raised concerns about privacy, but it did not immediately acknowledge it and promised to make changes that were more damaging. Dropbox also raised privacy concerns last year, and has not been resolved yet, at least not technically.

Of all the data storage companies I mentioned, only SpiderOak explicitly stated that it would not review the data stored by the user. They do not retain the key. And all other companies are using their own means to check data stored by users.

So which company would you trust? Do you encrypt data before sending it to the cloud?

What are the main collateral losses? Is trust.

I've seen a lot of articles on the web that attack trivial features in data storage applications. It's fair. None of them seems to have been able to make a clear statement that all employees of the company will be able to see the data when they are uploaded to the cloud. Appoint a full-time employee? There are also systems that can prevent users from abusing them. But can it work?