"Half the price of dropbox, this is just begging for a kick ass desktop/mobile app."
And I want a pony.
No client sync software, no sharing. I think the Dropbox folks will sleep well at night.
Smooth client software is half the value of paying for Dropbox and I don't see an Amazon side project challenging Dropbox in client usability anytime soon.
This looks more like a middle finger to any eventual iTunes cloud strategy.
I think one thing everybody should have learnt about Amazon is that they have perfected the MVP strategy. This is JUST ground-zero.
In the coming weeks/months, expect to see rapid iterations...i.e. I wouldn't be surprised if they announce a desktop-side client in relatively short order.
How on earth does a large company like Amazon manage to keep pushing out so many innovative products so frequently.
I suspect this is causing some disturbed sleep patterns at Dropbox, but you're right - without the "mounts as a folder and auto-syncs" behaviour that Dropbox has done so well, this isn't going to cut into their profit margins yet.
Right now, this is not super useful - those of us who always early-adopt stuff like this probably already have Zumodrive and Dropbox accounts, as well as our own S3 accounts. In it's current form, this is not quite as useful as Zumodrive, which I've stopped using because Dropbox works so much more nicely.
If I were the Dropbox people, I'd be busy keeping the development moving forward to make it even easier for non technical people to understand what they are and use it, to ensure Amazon are still behind when they finally catch up.
(I'd also consider seeing whether I could match Amazons "mp3's purchased thru Amazon are stored free" offer - I'll bet Amazon are doing that with some smart de-duping filesystem magic which means they only have to store one copy of the mp3 file. I wonder if Dropbox are big enough to be able to gain major wins from that too...)
As near as I can tell it only gives you free storage for MP3s purchased and explicitly downloaded to Cloud Drive /when purchased/. So there might not even be need for smart de-duping - their originals are probably stored in S3 as well.
Dropbox is on Amazon. You're paying for the kickass desktop/mobile app. Sure, I wish it was less, or that you could get more than 100GB…but this isn't a replacement.
One would hope this would prod DropBox into offering more fine grained pricing tiers and a sharing tier less than $700/month but I'm not going to hold my breath. The money they are pulling in now is too good to bother.
