The Wall Street Journal has an article up discussing Google's plans for an online storage service. Such a service, popularly called Gdrive (although Google itself has advertised no such name), has been rumored for quite some time but WSJ is indicating that they expect it to be rolled out within the next few months.

Initially the service is expected to be aimed at consumers, competing with Box.net and XDrive, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them expand to corporate service at some point as well. Google's style of long beta tests with steady, incremental improvements is much more forgiving in a free consumer service, but as Amazon has shown with S3, there is money to be made off corporate data storage, and Google's backend capacity towers over what Amazon has available. A period of free or steeply discounted consumer service followed by a corporate offering would mirror almost exactly what Google has done with Gmail/Apps. They worked out the kinks with the consumer service, and are now going after enterprise customers.