As Google continues to fuel rumor mills-a-plenty about the unveiling of its online storage service, now Microsoft is also in the mill. Google's rumored "GDrive" has been joined lately by talk of Microsoft's "Live Drive" service, which would also give customers the ability to store vast amounts of information on Microsoft servers far away from homes and businesses.

But Microsoft's service is not a rumor -- the company has confirmed its existence. Up to two gigabytes will be available to Microsoft Live Drive customers for free, with more storage available for a fee, which has not yet been disclosed. With Microsoft starting to pump up its "Live" services in anticipation of the launch of Windows Vista, it better hurry -- the Vista launch, unless it slips again, will be here in January 2007.

Google's rumored service may just be around the corner as well. But the company has not even speculated that it may be working on such a service, let alone that it may ever offer a service like this. No surprise, as Google loves to launch products with little to no official foreshadowing . Will the online storage "battle" be publicly won by Google or Microsoft -- and will customers trust large chunks of data to either company? For images and documents not of a sensitive nature, I think they will.

With the pending release of the Google GDrive online storage service, and with Microsoft's Live Drive also stepping into the foray of online storage as well, it seems that Google and Microsoft are flanking themselves in a perpetual game of one-upsmanship that continues unabated right now. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but this is getting ridiculous.

It seemed, in a sense, that Microsoft was there first in some areas: Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentation software for the masses. Yes, to be 100% accurate, Lotus 1-2-3 and others has conquered their respective arenas before Microsoft showed up and gave it to the masses, but I'll digress. Then, Google comes along with a highly-innovative Internet search product that blows the doors of off competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft -- and earns billions for Google (and still counting).

Then Microsoft hires Ray Ozzie to re-invent the software giant in the consumer space into another Google (web-based, well, everything), just as Google buys Writely to compete with Microsoft's Word product, then releases Google Calendar to semi-complete with Microsoft Outlook and Google Spreadsheet to semi-compete with Microsoft Excel.

This is a maddening case of cat-n-mouse and local-install-n-web-based service and product offerings, and it's pitting two giants against each other in very serious and funny-to-watch ways. We're going to round 13 here, folks. Stay in your seats.