Jeff Bezos is using Bill Gates' playbook from the 1990's: build alternatives to the most popular apps on your platform; bundle them; and improve app quality over time. This business strategy is very hard for a company like dropbox to compete against, even if they have better IP/quality/features.
Edit: we can also expect Amazon versions of "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply" and "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".
One big thing Zacolo has over Dropbox is cheaper pricing. Dropbox for Business is $15/mo [1] per user (can be up to 30% cheaper if you pay in-full for a year), where-as Zacolo is $5/mo [2] per user. That'll put downward pressure on Dropbox's corporate pricing unless they have much better service, or much better features, than Amazon.
I'm a dropbox customer. I'll be staying with them for the foreseeable future, but I'm glad to see competition might bring me more space and/or cheaper pricing.
i have to laugh at this. the main point of quicktime was to work as bait and switch. and microsoft having invented the tactics, defended against it.
after microsft lost that one, apple itself made quicktime (and then itunes) incredible slow and bogus on windows. while previous versions were just fine.
Did that really happen? My iTunes library lived primarily on a Windows box until 2 years ago and the only weirdness I can think of was Apple breaking some of Microsoft's windowing conventions.
To be fair, the MS Office experience on OS X is about the same: pretty normal with some things slightly off.
if itunes and quicktime was never slow on your windows box, then i can say with certainty that you changed computers at least every year and always to expensive models.
Afaik, it's not competitively priced for large volume. We priced around 650 users for box, and it came out to be roughly $8K annually. At $5/month/user, the Amazon offering would be roughly $40K annually. I'd actually prefer to go the Amazon route, but they're going to have to offer volume discounts to make it compelling.
If you have 650 users (who I'm assuming are paid employees), doesn't the cost become marginal in comparison to improved productivity?
I would guess the time to re-train all 650 on a new platform and the ease of transferring existing files would be more meaningful than the price difference.
I'm actually waiting for clarification on this...I think my team might've misinterpreted the quote, and if so, Amazon would be significantly cheaper. I'll update as soon as I know (most likely Monday).
It was anticompetitive for Microsoft in the mid-90s because they had a very solid monopoly over the personal computer operating system market. A case against Amazon would be much weaker because they don't even have a majority of the market much less a monopoly.
You shouldn't have to already be a monopoly to have your acts qualified as anti-trust. Just like the law should punish you for trying to scam people even though your scam didn't work.
Otherwise, everyone would at least try to scam everyone else and would at least try to become a monopoly, since it costs nothing unless you win. And if you do win, the fine won't reach the amount you put in the bank (at least in the case of monopolies, e.g Microsoft).
Speaking broadly, that's not true. Monopolies are not intrinsically illegal. Antitrust law is specifically about business practices, and the notion that monopolies have to be more restricted because they can use their domination of one market to affect related markets. What got Microsoft into trouble wasn't having 90% of the operating system market, it was the allegation that they were using that monopoly to take over the nascent browser market, force OEMs to accept terms that prevented alternative OSes from competing on level ground, and so on.
I suspect Amazon is on their way to running afoul of such laws, or would be if the current business climate wasn't comparatively hostile to the notion of this kind of regulation. I don't think, however, that Zocalo is going to be a piece that attracts much attention; it's going to be the way Amazon seems to increasingly deal with their suppliers in Walmart-esque fashion. (Walmart was notorious for going beyond merely asking for "large customer" discounts and heading into "we will tell you what wholesale price we're going to pay, and you will either make it work or you'll lose the 60-70% of your business we represent.")
While your description of antitrust law is both commonly held and comparatively reasonable, it is unfortunately not always accurate in the United States. For a particularly egregious case, see US v. Alcoa, where the aluminum company was judged to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act simply for having a high market share, despite there being no accusation of any specific anti-competitive business practices.
Looks like for years, we've been saying that Amazon will likely try and compete with Dropbox and Box. Looks like that time has come.
Having used Dropbox for personal stuff, and Box for work stuff, I have to say, neither has completely fit my needs.
Sure, Dropbox is great for working within small groups/teams, and for personal syncing. Sometimes the sharing functionality gets a bit wonky, but definitely the best implementation by far.
Box works decently well in the work environment, but it is definitely clunkier than Dropbox in a lot of respects. No one liked using Box where I worked (FB).
On my own, I've found that the most of my clients don't use any of these. In fact, they still try to run things on FTP sites! As a result, I've had to adapt to them and use Citrix ShareFile. It actually serves a different purpose than Dropbox or Box. It's a drop-in replacement for sending/receiving files to people within and outside your organization. I can silo off folders to specific users, companies, etc. I can send a link to folks asking them to upload files to me. It's definitely fit the bill in a lot of respects.
So internally, I still use Dropbox. But I don't expose that externally to my clients.
It seems that Amazon Zocalo is trying to compete with Google Drive, by allowing you to edit files in the browser, and integrate with your existing IT infrastructure. Not a bad tactic, but I think the service that will do really well in enterprise is one that merges the functionality of ShareFile into Dropbox, with IT integration.
I'm enjoying pydio for file sharing outside of our lan. Its a FOSS LAMP app and its pretty slick. I put it on one of our Linodes and off we go. No need to pay for some cumbersome licensing or yet another cloud provider per app/user.
I was just at the keynote in NYC. I didn't hear them mention anything about allowing you to edit files in the browser. The only thing I saw demonstrated was preview of documents with comments collaboration but no create/update functionality. It felt like a read-only version of Google docs with commenting.
I wonder how this new AWS service is going to interact with Amazon Cloud Drive as they seem to be similar products but one is aimed at Consumers and the other is aimed at the Enterprise.
I tried using Box for a similar reason (I needed a way to securely share multiple files and/or folders with external clients in a way that did not require them to install software or sign-up for some service) and it just doesn't work. I also desired a way to automatically upload new content to this platoform.
No dice. After emailing with 6 different Box employees (all ignoring my requests and trying to sell me on shit I didn't ask for, then would just pass me onto someone else) I was finally told that I could only do that if I paid for an enterprise "call for pricing" license.
Sigh. I'm using a http-auth secured index-of directory for now. If anyone has a superior suggestion, I'm all ears.
One alternative: ownCloud running on a vps. I have a 500gb plan with vpsdime for US$7/month (and you can upgrade up to 2tb).
owncloud 7 is just to be released in one or two weeks with several improvements, including server to server sharing.
With companies like similarweb [1], collecting click stream from millions of (unaware) users via various browser extensions, you can pretty much forget about the "private link" concept.
I thought we learned this week that "private links" for sharing documents are horribly insecure. I'm pretty sure they want it to still be password protected, which ShareFile is.
BTW, Google Apps has a feature where you can share to "people within my domain who have the link", which is a very nice middle ground between "everyone on the Internet with the link" and "I need to explicitly choose who to share this with.
The hangup is, Dropbox does a pretty good job of being invisible, while in my experience creating slick software is one of Amazon's greatest weaknesses.
I -hated- my time with Box. It was extremely confusing to use and terrible to find things once I closed the tab and returned. I remember always feeling lost.
You're not the only one. I know so many people who are forced to use Box at notable tech companies in SF and absolutely hated it compared to using Dropbox.
We use Accellion Kiteworks [1] at my place of employment, serving much the same purpose as you describe for Citrix ShareFile. Works very, very well as an FTP replacement.
This is a move against SharePoint Online/Box/EMC's shitty thing. The proof will be how well it works.
Box can work well enough if you've got everyone on it and you're using it as your main file server. The problem is that if you want to use it with users who expect it to work like Dropbox, it's not really designed for that kind of nimble access.
The pricing is totally inline with the competitors on a per-seat basis. It's even cheaper if you have any of the think client instances.
Interesting to see how it plays out -- and what impact this will have on Box, now that it is delaying its IPO.
Please please please let companies use this instead of SharePoint. Anything sane.
Ah well, probably the kind of people who make "enterprise" buying decisions will not even SEE Zocalo on their perception radar, so it will never happen.
So I should have clarified, my experience is not with Syncolicity but with Documentum. Syncolicity might be great. Documentum, however, is/was just god awful.
I wonder how long it's going to be before Dropbox announces another vertical. They have an amazing product, but it's basically been unchanged for years now and been allowed to succeed (and thrive!) as such because competitors have always treated their own Dropbox-style clients as a hobby instead of a product.
I use Copy for storing photos since it gives a lot of free space. The client is more or less identical to Dropbox's. I can barely tell the difference between the popup for Dropbox and the popup for Copy, and it works the same. I wrote a post comparing prices and features: http://mkronline.com/2014/06/05/dropbox-vs-copy-a-comparison...
I disagree that the product has been unchanged for years. Their app syncs photos on my phone, the shared link gives a great preview of files (esp videos), they've got a strong API for developers and they're improving picture sharing.
These may seem like little changes to one product but they're making it a rock solid product in one vertical that is slowly creeping out into others.
Okay, it's fairly off-topic, but after reading that I had to respond. I consider the shared link a serious anti-feature compared to the old direct link, I suppose due to poor engineering.
- For pictures: There is no way to see the full resolution without clicking the download link. Fine for photos, no good for the screenshots I like to upload.
- For PDFs: uses pdf.js. That would be nice if I were still using Adobe Reader, not so much in Safari where I have a superior reader built in.
I don't see what Carousel does that Dropbox didn't do already. Dropbox app already backs up all photos, allows me to browse them and to share them with others.
You know, I actually thought that too, then I tried to actually use it for a while, and found the viewing and sharing to be such a breeze. On Android, to share a photo, you just have to swipe up, and all the photos that you swiped up on will be shareable very easily in just two clicks.
I also thought the technology behind it is quite interesting.
https://tech.dropbox.com/2014/04/building-carousel-part-i-ho...
Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service (I'm comparing the monthly 100gb plan), yet they can't lower the price because they likely have a massive number of customers who are fine with paying $10 / month and/or don't know about cheaper competitors...so the price will likely stay put until they start to see signs of their existing base churning out, but by then their competitors may already have won over a lot of mindshare.
The thing is that there is no competition to Dropbox that works equally well. It's like saying 'BMW is feeling the heat from all those Dacia's being sold'. No they're not, they're in different markets, providing a premium product for a premium price. People who care about 10$ / month for something that they presumably use every day are customers you need to drop asap anyway.
Well for my purposes, and this is subjective, google drive works equally well. Granted I may not need all the features that dropbox offers anyway. However, google seems to be quickly coming up to par with the rest of dropbox's offerings, and in the long run as cloud storage becomes more and more of a commodity the only differentiator will be price.
Google Drive's online stuff is good, but the syncing client is still way worse than Dropbox unfortunately. Slow to scan your folder and uses lots of cpu/ram, uses all your upload bandwidth and kills the connection, no delta syncs, no local network syncs, has to reupload the whole file if you move it to a new location, etc.
I've also found it the worst at handling temporary connection issues. Dropbox, Box, etc. will start up as soon as they see internet without a problem but Google Drive will just sit there until I quit and restart it.
Sure, and plenty of people are perfectly happy with their Dacias, and there is nothing wrong with that. Cars never became a commodity and never will, even if todays cheapest cars have features the most of expensive ones of just 15 years ago didnt't. Dropbox isn't just 'storage', it's a service that has plenty of options to differentiate.
I'm not referring to Dropbox versus its competitors. I'm suggesting that Dropbox should focus on price discrimination for its own product lineup, because Dropbox apparently (at least as explained by jliptzin) has potential customers with a high variance of willingness to pay.
It seems discrimination is a loaded term. Price Discrimination isn't a bad thing. It refers to the practice of getting a customer to pay exactly what they can for a good. A common example of price discrimination is airline tickets. If you buy a ticket 3 months in advance vs 3 days in advance you essentially pay more for the same product.
What DropBox needs/should/could figure out is a way to sell subscriptions at $10 to those who are comfortable for paying $10 (which seems to me is completely unlikely, when you get competitors, cost tends to go down)
>Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service
Care to name some of the competitors?
Besides Google Drive, I mean, which I won't use (tried it, and it was crap compared to Amazon, but am trying to avoid Google in general, and I don't want to encourage their bundling of Google Apps with the Drive).
Google Drive, OneDrive, and now it looks like amazon is throwing their hat into the ring. These are all cheaper options. I switched to google drive from dropbox without a problem.
> Gotta love Amazon, at $5/user/month that is 1/3rd the price of Dropbox for business
Or, probably more relevantly, exactly the same price as the limited-storage tier of Google Apps for Business when the latter is paid monthly, but with 6+ times as much storage, and half the price (again, using monthly rather than annual pricing) of the Google Apps for Business unlimited storage + Vault offering.
Google Apps does, however, offer slightly lower prices with annual commitment, and I don't see anything in the Amazon Zocalo description that makes it clear that it has any compelling features that Google Apps doesn't (it seems like its just a competitor to Drive with enterprise admin tools of the type Google also seems to have in its Google Apps for Business offering, at least at the higher tier, without any of the other things that come with Google Apps.)
Dropbox is in a challenging situation. They've grown too large for an exit and without large partner, they are fighting an uphill battle againt giants like Google, Apple and Amazon. I would not bet on them.
IPO may help the founders cash out, but it won't be enough for the company to overcome heavyweight competitors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple.
Yes it will. An IPO can either cash you out, or it can raise cash. In fact, once you've had your IPO, you can raise cash quite easily. Amazon could never have competed with WalMart if they had kept private.
Count the number of times that a company has hosted with AWS, gotten reasonably (or very) successful, and then had Amazon enter their vertical and completely undercut them. Netflix and now Dropbox, at least.
And still startups flock to AWS like it's mana from heaven.
If AWS allows you to startup and scale without unnecessary overhead, it is mana from heaven. Being successful enough for Amazon to want to compete with you is the sort of problem you want to have...
Also, not sure I understand the "Amazon Prime Video undercuts Netflix" argument. $7.50/mo for Prime vs. $9/mo for Netflix Streaming is pretty much the same ballpark, and you have to pay for Prime up front. I have both (gotta get my free shipping), and I find myself using Prime Video only for the HBO shows.
The answer to that depends both on your scale and also probably on the business model (ie, if you're selling a storage solution you have different needs than a dating website).
I'm intrigued by Rackspace's new OnMetal service, but at any reasonably large scale it's usually a big win to own the hardware (as long as you can afford redundancy).
Both Amazon and Dropbox Business seem to provide 200 GB/user (although DropBox claims you can request more, whatever that means (free?)).
It is hard to say how they compare on functionality (e.g. versioning, auditing, integration (e.g. Kerberos, AD, etc)). The Amazon web-site is very light on details. It isn't even clear if Amazon has some kind of desktop sync application which is DropBox's bread and butter.
I'd need to wait for a LOT more information on Amazon's offering before jumping ship. Things like versioning (rollbacks, etc) are non-negotiable for many business users and while Amazon's offering might have that the web-site could do a better job letting us know as much.
"You can install the Zocalo client application on your desktop and laptop computers running Windows 7 or MacOS (version 10.7 or later) and designate a folder for syncing. Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices. You can also access Zocalo from your iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets."
Yeah seriously. Cheaper and it looks like there is more functionality, unless Dropbox provides collaborative editing tools(I haven't used anything beyond the simple sync with dropbox).
If anything, I hope this pressures Dropbox to lower their pricing or add a lower-priced tier. I think they're leaving money on the table with more casual users who would gladly pay $5 for a bit more space, but balk at $10/month for 100GB of space when they only need 10GB.
How is Box significantly cheaper? Box is $5 / seat for 100GB, with a cap of 10 users at that tier - if you want more than 10 users in an organization you have to buy in at the $15 / seat price point. Zocalo's $5 / seat for 200GB is a pretty good value in the enterprise space.
Since the more literal meaning is "base" or "plinth", I guess they want Amazon Zocalo to be both the foundation and center of your document collaboration infrastructure just as the Zocalo in Mexico City once was the center for collaboration and discussion.
The marketing copy doesn't mention local (or remote) filesystem integration. This doesn't look like a direct Dropbox (or Box or Google Drive) competitor to me — more like Microsoft SharePoint. Amazon does not seem to have gone for the consumer market here, nor even for small businesses. "Enterprise-ready."
> # What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.)
> Google might finally unleash GDrive and steal a lot of Dropbox's thunder
> (especially if this takes place before launch.) In general, the online
> storage space is extremely noisy, so being marginally better isn't good
> enough; there has to be a leap in value worthy of writing/blogging/telling
> friends about...[1]
This was from Drew's YC dropbox application. It looks like it should have said "Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft would all unleash their cloud platforms at lower price points with software services sitting on top." Drew does have a very valid point: Being marginally better isn't good enough. I love Dropbox's service and I want them to win, but this pricing war is not great news for them.
It's discouraging that Amazon is able to keep moving forward with such predictable momentum while the management teams of its competitors still haven't figured out how to take on Amazon circa 2008.
This product looks great. I run Kivo (www.kivo.com YC S13) we're trying to address a lot of the same problems around sharing and storage that Dropbox et al have missed out on. Zocalo seems like a really good first pass, but I don't think tying users to a specific storage platform is the winning strategy for something that's fundamentally a collaboration app. It shouldn't matter where someone stores their files, collaboration applications should exist as layers on top of existing content. Forcing users to move to a new platform is one more point of friction when it comes to adoption. Storage companies releasing collaboration products is like email providers only letting their users email other users of their service - Gmail to Gmail email product. The reason why email works as a communication protocol is because it is an open one. Content collaboration is the same, the company that will win this market will be the one that addresses it without letting the politics of the 'storage wars' poison its simplicity. The 'it just works' of Dropbox comes from its ability to store and sync any file without any change in user behaviour - it's just another folder. No one's created an 'it just works' product for collaboration yet, where it doesn't matter whereabouts your files are stored or who it is that you want to work with. That's what we're trying to do at Kivo, and we'll be announcing a set of integrations very soon to make that so. If you'd like to help, get in touch, my email's in my hn profile.
I like your clever use of "looks great" and then a subtle dig with "seems like a really good first pass" and then sneaking in some weaknesses before explaining why the strengths of your platform are better. Then bookending a second branding mention of "Kivo" to wrap things up.
No, I think you did a great job of appearing really positive. That style is all the rage these days and it looks like you have a great grasp of it. Keep up the great work!
"The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure."
But, as far as I know, they don't use Azure/Amazon for any non-storage functionality.
I dumped iTunes for Amazon's music store - works really well on iPad, Android phones, and my laptop. Apple lost me when my curated iTunes library was not available on my droid. Really like the Amazon player clients.
Zocalo looks good for one account for pictures and videos shared by my extended family with permissions, and still keep my work stuff separate.
Where Dropbox really wins though: smooth integration with so many other services. I can, for example, edit my leanpub manuscripts on my laptop, surprisingly well also on my iPad, and actually OK on my droid phone. Same for many other apps that use the Dropbox APIs.
What will probably keep me on Dropbox forever is that $100/year seems really inexpensive for a service that I use a lot, and it would take too much of my time to switch.
This makes it much more likely that competitors that rely on amazon services will need to build the entire storage stack in order to compete with Amazon. Hopefully this leads to more great oss solutions for building things like s3.
It'd be interesting to see if their annotation allows for exporting to their original documents. It's similar to what http://www.notablepdf.com did but only for PDF documents. Their export functionality for MS Word is quite interesting, and would actually work extremely well for lawyers who constantly use tracked changes.
Zocalo. I've heard that word somewhere here in Bolivia before. It's hardhat-construction related, I'm not sure if it's related to sockets or maybe a type of wrench.
I think it's the little plastic you put into a hole in the wall after you drill it. It's so the screw you place in the wall is securely set and won't move. Cool name!
Zócalo means plinth. It's a base for another object, including foundations, baseboards, or the columns upon which a statue might sit.
Antonio López de Santa Anna was the president (eleven noncontiguous terms) of recently independent Mexico in the early 1800s and wanted to build a monument to the Revolution that started in 1811 and secured that independence. He had the government put up a plinth for that monument in the central plaza where the National Cathedral and Presidential Palace sat, but it was never finished. Santa Anna was too busy losing Texas to the slave power; the Anglo Texans rebelled because Mexico had abolished slavery and they wanted some.
Now Mexican towns almost always have a central square with the local church on one side and the ayuntamiento (city hall) on the other. It usually has elaborate band stands, gardens, benches, and flagstone walking paths.
The central plaza in the capital of the Mexican Republic, officially the Plaza of the Constitution, came to be called by metonymy the Zócalo. The plinth itself was taken down in the 1850s, but the name stuck. In fact, the name spread through the country and now all the central plazas in the republic are called zócalos.
baseboard or plinth. I think they were going for "something upon which the rest is built" but it comes across as meaning merely ornamental or decorative.
The thing that makes it attractive to me is that it can sync with a Netgear NAS. About half our staff are in a central office, the other half are remote, so this is a solution that looks like it would cater well to that situation.
Looks like everyone is pushing on enterprise cloud storage. After Google/Microsoft price slash and Amazon entering that market I wonder what would happen to Box IPO.
Looks like this market will commoditized and be yet another race to bottom.
This is what I was waiting to happen ever since Dropbox became popular. I always said Dropbox is a good idea but its not a long term business. Remains to be seen how they fare.
The company that does best in this market will be the company that exists to service its customers, not the company that exists to compete with others.
If it was a startup, the name would be fine. But it's amazon, and from a branding perspective, in terms of the cloud computing services they offer, zocalo just doesn't fit.
Amazon Web Services
Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
Simple Storage Service (S3)
Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon WorkSpaces.
And then there is Zocalo.
Sure, Elastic Beanstalk is less "enterprise professional" compared to the others, but the name is incredibly descriptive, they are comparing the service to a magical beanstalk that grows and grows, like with the service, your app will autoscale.
Zocalo doesn't have the "enterprise professional" sound of the major services, nor the descriptive nature of the more fun named services. So while it may not be _awful_, I have no qualms in saying it is not good.
That makes sense. I understood it was criticized for not being hip enough but in reality the opposite is true, it is probably too hip for its market place and vis-a-vis other Amazon products.
I agree. It is suitable for a project code name... not so much for the product's brand. As a native English speaker, Zocalo makes me think of words like ziggurat, mojito, zapata, and mahalo.
It really is. No matter how much you thought about it, how many nights of brainstorming with your pillow smelling like señoritas, or perhaps drinking margaritas at a pub in the zocalo. It is stupid.
Please say this is a 'beta' and it will be renamed to Amazon cloud, drive, square, plaza, or whatever but drop it, just drop it.
No. It's like SharePoint and Box. Google Drive sync clients don't obey Active Directory policy rules the way they need to. This does. Which is huge for big businesses.
This is competing with Box and with clunkier solutions from EMC. It's also competing against SharePoint Online.
I really like Dropbox, an state of art product and I'm also a great fan of Bezos company and his strategies, but I currently feel very satisfied with Dropbox, everything works very well.
Yeah distrusting the CIA & NSA is a real counter-cultural thing here at Hacker News. You're more likely getting downvoted for talking about getting downvoted.
This needs more attention. Can we even trust OpenBSD, much less Linux? There's so much code in there. How could we possibly know that they're safe? That packets aren't a little bigger than they need to be? We'll just have to live with it I guess.
Hard to tell. It's for sure easier to compromise/court slapp a few rather large coorporations than to penetrate thousands or millions of self-hosted instances.
because zero owners of regular amazon accounts are for corporate use.
so far they only tied the accounts with cloud services, where the audience is clever enough to not use their home amazon accounts at. and instead create one with their employer email.
now with this office suit, everyone will just login with their home account. just like they do with corporate google docs. well, google is a bad example because then they made everything worse by joining personal and domain (which often meant employee at small company) into a single account.
The observation that this is similar to Drive doesn't imply that it is not-allowed for that reason. It does seem to imply that the commenter found it not-interesting because it doesn't seem (to the commenter) to offer anything new, but not-interesting is not the same as not-allowed.
Edit: we can also expect Amazon versions of "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply" and "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".