Welcome to The Google Desktop?

Thanks HellBender. Here's a thought that I hope to expand upon more in the near future. Will Google's new Gmail free email system be just the first of many things we begin moving to a new Google Desktop? If so, Microsoft might have a lot more to worry about than web search.

Today, plenty of people download mail to desktop-based email programs. But Google might convince some of them to take up its email storage offer.

After all, even if you do have a great way to search through your desktop-based email, you might like the idea that all your mail is backed up, stored offsite and easily searchable from anywhere, to boot.

Now take things a step further. Imagine next year that Google provides anyone with 5 gigabytes, 10 gigabytes or more of storage space for personal files.

Got a ton of Word documents, spreadsheets and other material? Push it across to us, Google would say. We'll store it, index it and make it easy to retrieve what you want. This type of material Google already indexes from across the web and has done for ages.

And I wonder what people would think of this. Do you trust your documents with the third-party? -Ed

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