Amazon's pricing here is the same as SpiderOak's, and Dropbox has been competing with us in the backup/sync space this whole time.
The industry has seen many of these these simple "cloud drive" products fail. I think the first was Xdrive. They just don't have the local response speed that users expect. I doubt Amazon will fail here, but as it is, this is not much in the way of competition for Dropbox or the rest of the sync industry. It's a different product all together.
Before your comment I don't think I'd heard of Xdrive. People know Amazon, Amazon already has a lot of users, and Amazon knows how to get people to buy things.
Odds are someone is going to have an account at Amazon rather than Dropbox, and when they go to the Cloud Drive site they see a massive button to upload files and get going immediately. As compared to Dropbox where the user has to download and install something first, and then go from there.
So yeah, I think Dropbox just lost a lot of potential users — sure, they may not have been the type of users who would pay Dropbox at first, but Amazon's service is only going to get better, and they're less likely to grow into a Dropbox paying user.
Entirely possible. Currently I am a dropbox customer and see no benefit in switching to Amazon. The only thing that would make me switch is if they came out with a Linux ARM client. It's the only hardware I have that doesn't have a native client and as more and more ARM devices are coming to market, more people will be wanting that.
As a Linux developer, it does feel as if Linux is a third world citizen and the company I work for has offered to do the work for them in porting it to ARM but with no response. If Amazon were to make the ARM client they would definitely see uptake in clients on the devices.
THats the funny thing about technology -- there isnt too much that is new -- its just that all the underlying factors for success are more mature, thus products today can succeed where ten years ago they failed.
No-worry syncing is what distinguishing Dropbox for me. Of course, I'm just one of their free-loaders, and come to think of it I may not find Dropbox as useful in a couple of months when I'm finally done with school assignments forever.
So far, the killer advantage for Dropbox is it's simplicity. Just drop your files in your Dropbox folder on one computer, and they magically appear on all your other devices. There's no upload/download bullshit, it all happens in the background. Not to mention that it seamlessly resumes transfers anytime your connectivity is disrupted, which again reinforces the ease of use "drop it in the folder and forget it" factor.
I don't see anywhere on the Amazon site about historic versions of files. I have once-or-twice needed to back into my file history at DropBox to find some things.
Not only is it not a surprise but I think Amazon.com are also well aware that Dropbox is likely developing their own storage back-end to move away from S3.
It makes sense. Their biggest running cost right now will be Amazon. Up to a certain size S3 makes sense as it would cost more to run the infrastructure yourself and it might be less flexible (scale wise) as a smaller operation can't afford to have an awful lot of spare capacity lying around. As the userbase continues to grow though, there will come a time when running their own infrastructure will work out cheaper and more flexible and they might be able to profit from it the same way Amazon do (remember: Amazon's "cloud" services came about from wanting a way to make profitable (or at least cost neutral) use of all their spare capacity in the quieter ten months of the year), so they would be daft not to at least have some embryonic plans simmering away on their R&D people's back burners.
Migration costs and effort will be high. Still, they need to become less dependent from S3. We opted for dedicated hardware at https://secure.cloudsafe.com and do not regret it: Higher security level, more uptime and in the long run much cheaper. Even if you pay some extra dollars for redundancy with added storage capacities.
Should be interesting to see how they respond in the coming days - if at all.
I hope Dropbox realizes that they can't compete with their supplier on price - so they need to differentiate themselves on value.
These prices are seriously ridiculous. 50% lower across the board. Kinda messed up - but I am in no hurry to leave dropbox any time soon.
Keep doing what you do dropbox. I am rooting for you.