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Topic: Storage

Cloud storage: Price wars ahead?

Summary: Many services will provide you or your business with a few gigabytes of free cloud storage. But Google, with its Chromebook Pixel and its three years of a free terabyte of Google Drive cloud storage, may be setting off a price war.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

By for Networking |

Who doesn't like free cloud storage? Many of us use Dropbox every day. Others build their businesses around Box's OneCloud services. And still others hunt eternally for the most storage for free, which, for the moment, would be Mega's 50 gigabytes.

But now, Google with its new Chromebook Pixel, has upped the ante. This new cloud-based laptop comes with a terabyte of free storage for three years.

05GoogleDrive
With Google "giving" away a Terabyte of storage with the Chromebox Pixel, we may be entering a new era of cloud storage price wars.

The one thing most people know about the Chrome OS-powered Chromebook Pixel is that it costs a whopping $1,299 for the Wi-Fi only version. That's $850 more than the next most expensive Chromebook, the Samsung S 550. What few people know is that the Pixel also comes with with a terabyte of free Google Drive cloud storage for three years. Normally, that would cost you $49.99 a month.

So with a little basic math, we can see that's a value of $1,800. Or, in other words, you would actually pay around $500 more for those three years for that same storage if you didn't buy a Pixel. Hmmm...

Obviously not everyone needs a terabyte of cloud storage to call their own; but if you do, it's a great deal. This leads me to wonder if other companies will follow Google's lead. Apple, for example, clearly wants you to use its iCloud not just for storage but for services as well. Microsoft, faced with the failure of Windows 8, is turning more and more to the marriage of Office Web Apps and its cloud-storage service, SkyDrive and other cloud-based services such as Office 365 for profits.

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What do Apple and Microsoft lack? Anything close to Google's low-cost storage offers. SkyDrive comes with 7GBs of free storage and iCloud with only 5GBs. That was fine in its day, but now Google has upped the ante.

As we shift from a fat-client PC-centric computing world to one that's increasingly based on cloud services and storage, I see free and low-cost cloud storage options becoming a more important sales point.

It's not just storage for individual users either. Amazon just cut its EC2 instance pricing again by as much as 27 percent. This comes on the heels of cloud storage cuts by Amazon and Google in November;  Microsoft cutting its Azure storage pricing in December; Rackspace slicing its  storage price-tags in February -- and on and on. We're already in the middle of a corporate cloud-storage price war. 

Here's how I see it playing out: First, for business storage, the war is going to go on for months more to come. It really is a race to the bottom. I don't see it stabilizing until mid-year.

Next, for personal storage, we were already seeing multiple services dueling for your cloud-storage dollars. Now, I see the battle moving to a new phase. I see Apple, Google, and Microsoft all offering more and more storage with their devices -- the iPad, Chromebook, and Surface Pro and Surface RT, respectively. I see Microsoft, which is in dire need of a boost to its Surface hardware line, making the next move; and then the others will follow.

For users, of course, this all means good times ahead. Whether you need terabytes for your servers or "just" a terabyte for your own needs, you'll soon be getting both for unbelievably low prices.

At the same time, this is going to kill some, if not most, of the smaller cloud storage companies. Apple, Google, and Microsoft can all afford to cut their cloud storage prices to the bone. Smaller companies can't. The cold math of business will kill some of the players within the year.

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Topics: Storage, Apple, Cloud, Google, Microsoft, Networking

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Talkback

9 comments
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  • Lock in...

    Well, what after 3 years, if you have 1TB stored in the cloud, you are locked in. Moving that volume of data out will be a huge problem
    srikumar2626
    Reply 5 Votes

    • LOL

      uploading a TB of data on consumer ISP, good luck Scroogle boy.

      Btw I(and lots others) have 25 GB free on Skydrive for life via the free upgrade, and we didn't have to buy a $1500 web browser.

      I'd love to see the cell bill after trying to upload a TB, might as well just say unlimited storage.
      everss02
      Reply Vote

    • 1TB??

      is that all you might have? If it's only 1TB, that's small. Moving that around will be fairly easy, just take a bit of time, you know, half day or something.

      No real issue.
      Cynical99
      Reply 1 Vote

  • It's not all about storage...

    Hi Steven,

    As always a very thoughtful article. While I think the cloud storage war will continue with providers offering more and more ridiculous amounts of free storage, consumers will soon realize that it is not only about free storage or storage at all. Yes, you may be able to "store" all your data in a Google Drive, but what about security? You have to read the TOS carefully to really know what rights you give Google with your data.

    Also, one has to be careful not to confuse cloud storage with backup. Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive and the like can never fully replace a proper local or online backup system. True, your article talks about cloud storage but many people will use it as a USB thumb drive replacement and try to backup their data with those services.

    In my opinion, cloud storage services will need to find their specific niche to compete in a highly crowded market, that niche can't be storage. But it may be security and encryption (see SpiderOak), or reliable file sync. Consumer will take huge amounts of storage for granted and soon ask: what else?

    Mauricio
    OnlineBackupReviews.org
    OnlineBackupReviews.org
    Reply 1 Vote

  • Cloud storage: Price wars ahead?

    Definitely a price war to come. More free storage for everyone. It would seem Google is so desperate to get people to use chromebooks that they are making a last ditch effort with storage to get them to sell. I'll stick with my >7gb on skydrive because I don't need Google sifting through my files spying on me.
    Loverock-Davidson
    Reply 1 Vote

  • Pathetic

    That is why cloud is crap what moron would pay 1800 bucks for a terabyte for 3 years when you can buy a local hard drive for a couple hundred without the bandwidth headaches...
    Tatiacha
    Reply 1 Vote

  • What a load of cobblers!

    That's Aussie for rubbish. "Faced with the failure of Windows 8"! At least for me, Windows 8 is great - on a touch 14" Asus. I work almost entirely from the desktop, and find it better than 7. I can access almost every program I need from my desktop and quicklaunch toolbars, and use start for anything else.
    jonc2011
    Reply Vote

  • Cloud storage

    all that have windows 8 it is not the full windows and has a lot missing and microsoft did not tell you and you give microsoft your computer when you agreed with the license you give microsoft the right to log in to your computer at any time with out you knowing it at all you gave give them all of your info and because it is in the cloud you give them you letters and Pictures and all we need to have them shut down the cloud they have not told you it has been hacked again and again and again have fun
    ttx19
    Reply 1 Vote

  • COPY!

    New cloud storage service with at least 10GB FREE! http://goo.gl/uAfs9 hurry up before they drop this generous launch offer
    dubree
    Reply Vote
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