Google launches price war in the cloud
The online storage wars got more intense last week when Google Drive slashed prices for people who want to store their videos, photos and documents online. But most experts say even the biggest storage hoarders can find ways to avoid paying for space in the cloud.
On Thursday, Google cut prices for its monthly online storage plans to $1.99 from $4.99 for 100 gigabytes, and to $9.99 from $49.99 for 1 terabyte. Google says 1 terabyte - the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes - is enough storage to take a selfie twice a day for the next 200 years - and still have room left over. Google offers 15 gigabytes for free. 'For Google and Microsoft, it's not really about the money,' says Avram Piltch, online editorial director of Laptop Mag and Tom's Guide, 'it's about increasing membership and getting people to be part of their ecosystem.' Microsoft's OneDrive offers 7GB for free and charges $25 a year for each 50GB. Dropbox offers only 2GB for free and charges $9.99 a month for each 100GB, up to 500GB.
'Google is doing to big data companies what Amazon has done to bookstores,' says Arun Taneja, founder of the Taneja Group, a Hopkinton, Mass.-based consulting firm that specializes in storage technology. 'It's trying to change the world of storage.' Most people only need around 5GB to 10GB, but Taneja says the industry will look very different in just a few years. 'The younger generation is living a very different life than 40-somethings and 50-somethings,' he says. 'Our storage needs are doubling every year.' Many people already store emails for free on Yahoo and Gmail, and plenty of family photo albums now exist on Facebook. (Facebook imposes a limit of 1,000 photos per album and compresses images by up to 80% when they're uploaded.)
But there are other tricks to snagging free storage. 'Set up separate accounts for work and personal email,' says Frank Gillett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Apps like Jolidrive and Otixo unify and manage data stored in different accounts - and with separate companies. And Dropbox offers several ways to get additional free space: get as much a 16GB more for referring friends (500 MB per friend); up to 3GB for using the automatic photo upload feature; 125MB for connecting Facebook and Twitter accounts and following Dropbox on Twitter; and 1GB for solving a ' Dropquest ' puzzle. Microsoft's OneDrive is offering 100GB of free storage for one year for users who earn 100 'Bing Rewards' by using the Bing search engine, clicking on Microsoft links and referring friends.
What's a Google deep link?
Google is deploying 'deep links' inside apps as a way to protect its $50 billion a year search empire from consumers' shift to mobile. Rolfe Winkler explains deep links on digits.
Many tablets and computers also come loaded with free storage - some for a limited time only. The Samsung Chromebook ($250) comes with 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years. The Asus Transformer Book T100 has its own free and unlimited WebStorage for one year. iPad and iPhone owners who sign up with Apple's iCloud, however, only get 5GB free storage and need to pay $100 for 50GB. The Galaxy S5 has 50GB free for six months with Box, 50GB of free storage with Dropbox for two years, and 1 terabyte of free storage for three months with Bitcasa, a newer cloud computing service. Of course, this shouldn't be the main deciding factor in choosing a device, Piltch says.
There will likely come a time when the free (almost) all-you-can-eat era of cloud computing will end, experts say. Once family photos and videos have been uploaded, it takes a significant amount of time and effort to relocate them, says Eric Chiu, president of HyTrust, a cloud security automation firm. And location data and other personal information embedded in files may also be lucrative to advertisers and marketers, he says. Indeed, consumers remain skeptical about what happens to their online memories: Over 72% of consumers say they don't believe organizations care about keeping their data private, according to a survey of 2,000 people that HyTrust released this month. 'The high level of distrust is breathtaking,' Chiu says. 'But they're not necessarily changing their behavior yet.'
Also see:
Why it's easier to rob bitcoins than banks
The days of tax-free digital content are numbered
5 apps for spying on your spouse
Post a Comment for "Google launches price war in the cloud"