Let's hope they keep racing to the bottom. To break down the value of each brand to consumers:
Dropbox
$120/year for 1 account, 1TB
No photo improvement or sharing features
No document interface (aside from coming compatibility with Office)
Google Drive
$120/year for 1 account, 1TB
G+ photo sharing and auto-awesome improvements
Good-enough GDocs and best-in-class real-time editing
OneDrive
$100/year for 5 accounts, "unlimited" storage (20k file limit)
No photo improvement or sharing features
Best-in-class Office and good-enough real-time editing
Amazon Cloud Drive
$100/year for 1 account, unlimited photo storage
No photo improvement or sharing features, but good timeline organization (and deduplication?)
No document interface
Bundled with Prime shipping/videos/music/lending library
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Of the above, Dropbox offers no real value aside from great functionality. That it "just works" SHOULD be a given, but given that OneDrive is capped at 20,000 files and fails to upload from my desktop, I guess we shouldn't take that for granted.
GDrive works fantastically well and offers great photo enhancement, but the price is the highest of anyone here. Particularly if they're trying to develop G+ into a Facebook competitor, you'd think they would offer more-than-competitive pricing to encourage consumers to keep their photo libraries online and glean information about consumer movement patterns, personal networks, local attractions, and personal brand interests. Why roll out cool auto-awesome features if you're going to price them out of the market?
OneDrive has the second best value behind Amazon Prime... in theory. In practice, OneDrive has a 20,000 file cap and again, the program simply won't upload my files from my desktop. There's no photo enhancement, sharing, or organization. I guess they're relying on Office as the big draw. Which makes sense -- documents are an insignificant burden, allowing for steady revenue with few attached costs. And most people won't understand that their photo libraries weren't safely uploaded to the cloud as they expected.
Amazon's Prime Photos is a GREAT value (and seems to work really well in uploading and organizing my photos), but I'm still unclear on whether Prime deduplicates my uploads or has excellent sharing/privacy controls like you can find on G+. Still, the photos feature makes Prime a must-buy even if the rest of Prime's insane value didn't already do that. The only catch is that Amazon doesn't offer two-factor authentication... which is a big deal, Amazon!
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Given that the company with the biggest consumer base can leverage their audience to build out the biggest, baddest infrastructure that subsequently takes advantage of marginal cost economics in the delivery of their own services or in the replacement of corporate IT... the race to the bottom makes perfect sense in the consumer sphere. You want the biggest consumer base to justify short-term expansion (and then finance that expansion in the long term with your locked-in customers).
This is only a race to the bottom if you assume that consumer storage is the end game of clouds. In ten years, the biggest clouds can theoretically provide services that replace most corporate IT... and even most personal computers, as seen in today's thin-client Chromebooks. And if Microsoft lets Google beat Azure in this arena, not only will Google dominate in the field of cloud services, Google's vast infrastructure could leverage economies of scale to deliver Google's search/local/maps/whatever services vastly quicker and cheaper than Microsoft could.
Clouds are the modern-day railroads. It's not a race to the bottom if you're investing to replace individual ox-drawn wagons with your own infrastructure.
I believe google drive also has partially unlimited photo storage, if the photos are below a certain resolution they don't count towards your storage quota.
That's true -- photos under 2000px are free, and Google will automatically resize full-size photos as they're uploaded. Personally, I just upload my entire photo library to GDrive and G+ automatically processes them into G+ Photos. Hopefully Google rolls out unlimited full-size photo storage soon, since even I'm not sure why I pay for GDrive when I already have Amazon Prime.
In an ideal world, G+ Photos will roll out with unlimited full-size storage that deletes both smaller-resolution duplicates already in G+ Photos and also deletes full-size duplicates taken from my GDrive. I don't even mind the vendor lock-in of G+, where it's fantastically difficult to download or delete your entire library. I just want a single, organized-by-date, comprehensive location for my entire library that allows me to hoard, peruse, improve, and share my photos. G+ is so damn close to that dream already...
I wrote off Flickr a long time ago and didn't even consider them for this comparison. My mistake.
Does Yahoo run Flickr on its own infrastructure, or rent it like Dropbox and Apple? If the former... why isn't Yahoo a major player in this market? Giving away a terabyte is great, but you would think that it signals a move by Yahoo to build out their infrastructure.
-Steve Jobs, paraphrased
- - - - -
Let's hope they keep racing to the bottom. To break down the value of each brand to consumers:
Dropbox
$120/year for 1 account, 1TB
No photo improvement or sharing features
No document interface (aside from coming compatibility with Office)
Google Drive
$120/year for 1 account, 1TB
G+ photo sharing and auto-awesome improvements
Good-enough GDocs and best-in-class real-time editing
OneDrive
$100/year for 5 accounts, "unlimited" storage (20k file limit)
No photo improvement or sharing features
Best-in-class Office and good-enough real-time editing
Amazon Cloud Drive
$100/year for 1 account, unlimited photo storage
No photo improvement or sharing features, but good timeline organization (and deduplication?)
No document interface
Bundled with Prime shipping/videos/music/lending library
- - - - -
Of the above, Dropbox offers no real value aside from great functionality. That it "just works" SHOULD be a given, but given that OneDrive is capped at 20,000 files and fails to upload from my desktop, I guess we shouldn't take that for granted.
GDrive works fantastically well and offers great photo enhancement, but the price is the highest of anyone here. Particularly if they're trying to develop G+ into a Facebook competitor, you'd think they would offer more-than-competitive pricing to encourage consumers to keep their photo libraries online and glean information about consumer movement patterns, personal networks, local attractions, and personal brand interests. Why roll out cool auto-awesome features if you're going to price them out of the market?
OneDrive has the second best value behind Amazon Prime... in theory. In practice, OneDrive has a 20,000 file cap and again, the program simply won't upload my files from my desktop. There's no photo enhancement, sharing, or organization. I guess they're relying on Office as the big draw. Which makes sense -- documents are an insignificant burden, allowing for steady revenue with few attached costs. And most people won't understand that their photo libraries weren't safely uploaded to the cloud as they expected.
Amazon's Prime Photos is a GREAT value (and seems to work really well in uploading and organizing my photos), but I'm still unclear on whether Prime deduplicates my uploads or has excellent sharing/privacy controls like you can find on G+. Still, the photos feature makes Prime a must-buy even if the rest of Prime's insane value didn't already do that. The only catch is that Amazon doesn't offer two-factor authentication... which is a big deal, Amazon!
- - - - -
Given that the company with the biggest consumer base can leverage their audience to build out the biggest, baddest infrastructure that subsequently takes advantage of marginal cost economics in the delivery of their own services or in the replacement of corporate IT... the race to the bottom makes perfect sense in the consumer sphere. You want the biggest consumer base to justify short-term expansion (and then finance that expansion in the long term with your locked-in customers).
This is only a race to the bottom if you assume that consumer storage is the end game of clouds. In ten years, the biggest clouds can theoretically provide services that replace most corporate IT... and even most personal computers, as seen in today's thin-client Chromebooks. And if Microsoft lets Google beat Azure in this arena, not only will Google dominate in the field of cloud services, Google's vast infrastructure could leverage economies of scale to deliver Google's search/local/maps/whatever services vastly quicker and cheaper than Microsoft could.
Clouds are the modern-day railroads. It's not a race to the bottom if you're investing to replace individual ox-drawn wagons with your own infrastructure.