Storage is an important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives. That’s why they’ve always offered a lot of free storage, and it’s why they offer paid options for buckets of ‘overflow’ storage spanning across’ applications. Now Google plans to offer consumers online storage as part of an attempt to shift personal computing to the Web, which essentially frees consumers to view their data wherever they are and makes them less dependent on a single hard drive. It also intensifies Google’s competition with Microsoft, since a consumer who stores data on the Web may have less need for Microsoft’s desktop software.