"Google wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives," reports The Wall Street Journal on a service that should launch in a few months. "The company plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee." How Google Stuff — for lack of a real name — will differ from Microsoft Live Workspace, Apple .Mac, or Yahoo Briefcase isn't clear. The Journal spends most of its time listing the scheme's potential problems and "privacy concerns." Before you rush to your blog to post "Game Over for Microsoft," recall you once said that about Google Base. Remember Google Base? Exactly.

Credit the Google PR machine with this much; They know how to stir up media froth without serving up any real products. Android and the OpenSocial initiative showed that much. Of course, the process is often as simple as leaking "scoops" to the Wall Street Journal. Today, for example, the Journal reports that Google is working on an Internet storage service that will work like just another hard drive. This would be a scoop, of course, if the software, codenamed "Platypus," hadn't been out for a year already. The paper cites "people familiar with the matter," but you can safely describe them as product managers eager to test the market without accountability. Remember the Journal's big Googlephone scoop over the summer? Same thing.