Topic: Storage
Storage Required for Top iPhone Apps has Increased 11x Since 2013 (Jun 19, 2017)
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Google Announces Backup and Sync Service to Back Up PC Files and Folders (Jun 15, 2017)
To my mind, this announcement illustrates just how tough it will continue to be for standalone storage and backup companies to establish viable businesses over the long term, because their key features will continue to be embraced and absorbed by the big ecosystems. I still use Dropbox for backing up my various files and syncing them between machines, but I just know that a point will come when Google or Apple will simply build those features into their broader service offerings, and then I’ll ditch Dropbox. There’s simply very little true differentiation in this area – storage is storage, and at a certain level backup is backup. Once you get the table stakes around simplicity and universal access, it mostly comes down to trust and pricing, where the big guys are likely to have a significant edge. To get to this specific announcement from Google: it’s going to be providing an easier way to backup and sync files from your PC to Google Drive, which doesn’t require you to keep your files in a special Google Drive folder on your computer, unlike Dropbox. And although free storage maxes out at 15GB, Google will be pretty competitive beyond that on pricing.
via The Verge
Amazon Wisely Nixes its Unlimited Cloud Storage Service for Consumers (Jun 8, 2017)
I occasionally see Apple criticized for not simply giving away iCloud storage, and some of those critics will occasionally point to Amazon’s generous offering of unlimited storage for $60 per year as evidence that Apple could do more in this direction. However, Amazon has now announced that it’s discontinuing the offer and moving entirely to tiered pricing along the lines of what others offer. I can’t say I’m surprised – unlimited anything is always a dangerous business model, because it will always attract the heaviest users, who will massively skew the overall economics. That’s true for all-you-can-eat buffets, unlimited wireless data plans and unlimited cloud storage. That’s not to say neither Amazon nor Apple shouldn’t be generous in the amount of storage they provide at various priced tiers, but it is to say that giving away either large amounts of storage for free or unlimited amounts for a fixed price are both bad ideas. Charging at least a nominal amount for storage teaches consumers that it has a cost (which across hundreds of millions of users can be substantial), while capping usage at various price tiers avoids abuses of the system. Unlimited as a pricing strategy is always much more about peace of mind that actual usage anyway – literally no-one needs unlimited anything – everyone’s usage tops out somewhere, and providing the right pricing and flexibility between offerings should meet all use cases across the spectrum. Despite this change, both Amazon and Apple are now offering pretty generous allowances of storage at various reasonable prices, which is the way it should be, and the prices per GB will continue to come down over time, as they also should.
via USA Today
Dropbox finally brings its Google Docs competitor out of beta – The Verge (Jan 30, 2017)
Dropbox is one of those companies I’m constantly surprised (and yet delighted as a power user) has managed to stick around. By focusing on document storage and syncing, it’s arguably at the feature level – something other ecosystems do in the course of offering a much more complete feature set – and yet it’s managed to find a niche for itself, generating an annual run-rate of $1 billion in revenues in the process. It’s survived in recent years largely by moving in the direction of its major rival Box, which has always been enterprise focused, while Dropbox has straddled the consumer-enterprise divide in the past. Though it seems pushing into adjacent areas would be critical for the company’s longer term survival, I’m not at all convinced that it can be competitive against Google Docs or Office, and therefore also not convinced this is where it should be focusing its diversification efforts. I’m still somewhat skeptical that the company can survive in the long run, and it feels like the exception rather than the rule among one-trick pony companies, most of which continue to either die off or be absorbed by one of the big players.
via The Verge