
Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimited Cloud Drive Storage - uptown
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/amazon-goes-after-dropbox-google-microsoft-with-unlimited-cloud-drive-storage/
======
ivank
"We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of
the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we
determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially
exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud
or misuse of the Service or harms our interests or those of another user of
the Service."

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201376540&ref_=cd_tou_fp&?ref_=cd_unlimited_tou)

~~~
skizm
"...if we determine that your use [...] substantially exceeds or differs from
normal use by other users..."

Why even bother putting "Unlimited" if they are just going to kick off the
power users?

~~~
Bhullnatik
Because you have to put a limit somewhere before people start to exploit it.

~~~
Karunamon
In which case it's not unlimited, in which case they're lying.

The first person who gets kicked off for this should file a false advertising
suit. The marketing doesn't get to give you something which the ToS
immediately takes away.

Maybe then these idiots (yes, idiots, because it takes an _astounding_ lack of
either morals or intelligence) will learn that _lying to your customers_ is
not okay.

~~~
jasonlotito
Other "idiots" that are "lying" about "unlimited" and should be sued for
"false advertising."

[https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

[https://www.dropbox.com/plans](https://www.dropbox.com/plans)

[https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/driveforwork/](https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/driveforwork/)

[https://www.box.com/pricing/](https://www.box.com/pricing/)

~~~
Karunamon
If they boot someone off for that particular reason, then yes, they absolutely
should.

Again - explain to me how Verizon can be successfully sued for "unlimited"
data (with throttling) and how these companies cannot with "unlimited" data
(with undisclosed caps).

Explain how the two cases are substantially different, please. Just because
Verizon are generally bastards and the companies above are generally not does
not make false advertising okay or legal.

~~~
jasonlotito
> explain to me how Verizon can be successfully sued for "unlimited" data

Just curious, but you say "successfully sued." I assume you mean they were
sued, went to trial, and lost. I've actually tried looking this up, but I
can't find this case. I've never really paid much attention to that, so
forgive me.

~~~
Karunamon
Found it: [http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/verizon-
wireles...](http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/verizon-wireless-
agrees-settle-deceptive-marketing-investigation)

It was a settlement, rather than an outright adverse ruling, but the net
effect was the same - someone had to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to
cut it out, they did, and had to pay out for their trouble.

------
cwyers
I don't see how Dropbox wins this. Dropbox isn't going to be able to beat
Amazon on price reselling Amazon's own cloud. Dropbox doesn't have any
complements, like Google does with Google Docs and Gmail and Android or
Microsoft has with Windows and Office or Amazon has with their MP3 marketplace
and their Fire devices. It's the whole Jobs thing with 'you're a feature, not
a product.'

~~~
wanderingstan
At least for now, Dropbox wins with better software and features. Google drive
has crapped out on me several times in the last years, forcing me to re-
download everything from the server to my local box. I've also had cases where
it couldn't resolve a sync issue and split a file into two versions. Neither
of these has happened with dropbox.

Given Google's obvious prowess with servers, I'm actually amazed Google drive
isn't better than it is.

~~~
300bps
I agree with you that DropBox is the gold standard in "it just works" but I
have been using Google Drive for about a year now on a 1 TB plan consuming 850
GB of space without a single issue.

I store everything on there including JPGs, AVCHD videos, TrueCrypt volumes
and every other kind of file type. Never had a single sync issue or slow sync
speed.

OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) on the other hand... That constantly left
filename.machinename split versions and the sync speed was uselessly slow.

~~~
mb_72
I tried Google Drive about a year ago, and it appeared to choke on large files
(I had a couple of 4Gb VMs), and pausing during attempted uploads always
resulted in having to start over the upload from scratch. Still sticking with
CrashPlan for now.

~~~
driverdan
CrashPlan is a backup service and not directly comparable to standard file
storage services.

------
shanemhansen
This strikes me as being somewhat similar to the historic relationship between
auto makers and dealers. Before dealer protection laws (that we now hate so
much), an auto maker could really just put any dealer out of business once the
dealer had shown that there was a viable market in that area.

It's a few years later and now we have several businesses who's business model
is essentially reselling amazon services (s3), and once they've shown it's a
viable business (dropbox) we can expect amazon to come in and undercut them.

There are two factors that might prevent amazon from being too successful in
the consumer storage area.

1\. Dropbox's UI, apps, and filesystem integration are both very well designed
and pretty technically complex. It might seem trivial to design something as
good, but I promise you it's not.

2\. Consumer storage pricing is in a race to the bottom, but consumer storage
volume is increasing exponentially. Once people start uploading all their home
videos to this service, will amazon be able to afford to run this business
unit?

------
magic5227
FYI everyone here, this is not even sync. It's a drag and drop to upload
applet :)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201376690)

"Note: The Cloud Drive Sync application (formerly, the "Cloud Drive desktop
application") is no longer available for download. If you already have the
application installed on your computer, you can continue to use it. However,
if you uninstall the application, you won't be able to reinstall it from the
website."

~~~
tomjen3
Sad. I would personally love to mount a drive so that I didn't have to have
nearly 100gb .raw files on my laptop but could still access them any time.

That thing is just useless for any purpose.

~~~
magic5227
Agree 100%

If they had selective sync with storage at that price, it would be a game
changer.

------
magic5227
It seems many people here commenting haven't tried it. It has no sync! The
online interface is awful!

This is currently such a bad product that its not likely to be a threat to any
existing solution.

Try signing up and seeing it for yourself. You will neither be able to sync or
upload a lot of content, nor use it once uploaded given the poor online
interface.

~~~
astrocat
Might want to check some facts here. There is an Amazon Cloud Drive app for
Windows and Mac that does syncing. It's not as advanced as Dropbox but it's
about on par with the Google Drive app.

Their online interface isn't terrible either - it's actually surprisingly
modern for an Amazon product. There's actually two views - one for files and
one for photos (just like Dropbox and Carousel). Again the file browser is
about as bare bones as it gets without document preview etc, but the Cloud
Drive Photos view is pretty decent.

Dropbox is miles ahead of Amazon in their UI and other features, but I think
for many very basic users, Amazon's offering will be sufficient for simple
backup/sync operations.

~~~
magic5227
FYI their FAQ says the sync is "old" and the new tool which will be updated is
drop to upload only.

Also, their file interface is far from modern. You can't drag and drop, right
click to share, anything expected from all of their competitors.

------
300bps
I currently pay about $120 per year for 1 TB of storage through Google Drive.
I use about 850 GB of that. After using all the various popular cloud drive
services, I can say this isn't about $ per GB anymore. $120 per year for 1 TB
is such a low amount of money that it becomes meaningless.

The next hurdle they need to overcome is sync speed. When you're dealing with
that much data (especially when made up of many tiny files like JPGs) it
becomes a significant engineering challenge. The sync speed with some services
can slow to a crawl. In my own use, Google Drive and DropBox have been the
best. OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) was unusable at certain file counts. I
haven't tried Amazon though. I would give it a shot if I go over the 1 TB mark
but would probably not try it just to try to save $60 per year.

~~~
sz4kerto
Anecdotal, but I just synced >10k files from OneDrive to the local drive, and
the sync saturated my internet connection (100 Mbit). (On Windows 10.)

~~~
tacos
OneDrive has been a mess:

"Prior to Windows 8.1, we had two sync experiences. One used on Windows
7/8/Mac to connect to the consumer service, and a second sync engine to
connect to the commercial service (OneDrive for Business). In Windows 8.1 we
introduced a third sync engine..."

This is Chris Jones, super smart guy, long-time vet of Microsoft, and ...
indicative of the kind of incredibly stupid shit only Microsoft can pull off.
Bonus points for the phrase "sync experiences" which indicates smart-dude-
weak-thinking at a legendary level. Sinofskyesque.

In the blog post he sort of admits the fuckup. Sort of. But who cares. It's
March and things already kicking ass on Mac, finally. After Windows 10 ships
it'll be fine. Five years late, but fine. Not like Dropbox got their nonsense
figured out with the long and generous head start. And not like Apple's done
any better, either.

------
misterjinx
There is something very unclear to me regarding the usage of the cloud drive
for kindle related stuff. I mean, until now every ebook I purchased on amazon
was available on amazon cloud. Also, they offered this option to documents you
sent to your device by email. How is this new cloud drive going to affect me ?
They already told me in the email that the current 5 GB plan is no longer
available and has been replaced with a free 3-month trial of one of the
Unlimited plans. The existing documents are available to download and view but
if I want to upload new files I must select one of the Unlimited plans. So no
more cloud storage for kindle (of course, unless I choose to pay according to
new plans) ?

~~~
mblakele
It looks to me like the "send to kindle" feature is broken unless you sign up
for one of the free trial options. That fits with the email they sent out: "In
order to upload new files you will need to pick one of the free 3-month
trials". I suppose I can still move things around using dropbox, but it's not
quite the same.

------
ghshephard
These "Unlimited" offers now bore me. I'd much rather they capture what the
actual offer is - is it 100 GB with 50 GB/month Upload, 50 GB/month Download?
500 GB with 100 GB/month upload, 1 TB/month download?

Just be honest with me and tell me what you are offering, don't play games
with "Unlimited"

~~~
rsync
If only there was a cloud storage provider that did just that.

If only they were hacker/unix focused and had been around since 2001 and even
had a HN readers discount.

If only ...

~~~
ghshephard
Rsync and Tarsnap are two of the of services that are excellent in this
nature. In particular, I'm almost 100% certain that if a user goes crazy, and
stores 1 TB+ on Rsync, that they wouldn't even blink.

Also incredibly attractive about Rsync, is that if you already have a lot of
exposure to AWS, then Rsync is an _awesome_ secondary store, as, based on my
limited understanding and reading of their FAQs, their is _no_ connection
between AWS and Rsync. Should AWS drop off the face of the earth, or some
exploit result in an extended data disaster, Rsync is in no way impacted.

~~~
hakunin
I'm pretty sure you're responding to the rsync creator.

~~~
ghshephard
Absolutely, but he was too modest to promote himself so I, an disinterested
third party did it for him.

------
geoka9
"Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday
moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many
gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up."

Моst people in the US and Canada have highly asymmetrical Internet
connections, so uploading gigabytes of accumulated media is hardly an enticing
proposition. I wonder if that's an important factor of why the cloud providers
are so willing to offer "unlimited" storage. If it was Eastern Europe, on the
other hand, they'd probably be swamped with data in days, if not hours.

~~~
ghaff
I suspect it's one factor--in addition to the fact that unlimited, like free,
sounds really good in marketing copy to most people. As a data point, I think
it took me something like 3 months to do my initial 1.3TB or so backup to
Backblaze. So somewhere in the few TB range is probably going to be the
practical maximum for most consumers.

------
Fastidious
I do not think Amazon is going after Dropbox, Google and Microsoft with this,
as the article title implies. Thus far, Amazon is offering a different
service: Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive all synchronize your files
(selective or all) Amazon's Cloud Drive does not.

------
bradfa
Is it a folder?

Dropbox is a folder. Everyone in my family understands "put things in this
folder, they sync automatically." I want that but at this price!

~~~
jforman
It is not a folder. Once I realized this I uninstalled. I don't want to
redownload files every time I need to work on them.

~~~
natch
It seems I want the opposite. I don't want to have the files on my local
machine. I want storage that is bigger than what my local machine has.
Hopefully at least one of us will get what we want from this.

------
mark_l_watson
I am glad to see more competition in this space! I frequently advise non-tech
family and friends to choose two cloud providers, and use them to replicate
important files.

I stopped being a paid Dropbox customer last year over the Condi Rice issue
(otherwise, a great service) but I still use their free tier. I also pay for
extra Google Drive storage, which I think is a good deal. The best deal, for
my use cases however, is Office 365 home edition: my wife and I each get one
terrabyte of cloud storage and up to date versions of all of the Office 365
productivity software (and the web versions are nice running Linux) -- all for
$100/year.

I am tempted to sign up for the new Amazon offering, but I already feel I am
so well replicated: every photo I take goes automatically to Google+,
OndeDrive, and Dropbox; almost all of my working files are inside of OneDrive
so get synced; I created compressed archive files for projects and with date
stamps save them away in Google Drive; projects stored at bitbucket and
github.

It will be interesting to see how well Amazon supports mobile devices and
multiple operating systems.

For me one of the biggest wins of cloud storage is being able to choose what
is not replicated to my laptops, etc.

------
Splendor
I would feel better about Amazon's offering if they were more transparent
regarding government requests. According to the EFF[0] Amazon doesn't tells
users about government data requests or publish transparency reports.

[0]: [https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2014](https://www.eff.org/who-has-
your-back-2014)

~~~
systemtheory
no doubt. amazon <heart> government.[0]

[0][http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/how-cia-
partner...](http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/how-cia-partnered-
amazon-and-changed-intelligence/88555/)

------
SXX
Oh these unlimited services. Just tried to upload some files:

> The file 1.zip did not upload because it is larger than 2 GB.

~~~
SXX
Update. Limitation only applied to web UI:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201376710)

Though as mentioned before app not currently available. :(

------
zkhalique
Well the takeaway from me as a Prime customer is now I can back up almost all
my photos to the cloud (hi NSA!) ... in fact if there was a convenient app on
my iPhone to automatically sync it, I'd sign up. Maybe in the future, Amazon
will offer some cool services for tagging and searching my photos. Makes
everyone suddenly want to become a high-res DSLR fanatic.

What I see is that Amazon is simply trying to maximize the power of Bundling.
It's all about that Prime, 'bout that Prime, no limit. (Except the unofficial
one which only a few people will run into, but the gamble is that the positive
PR will attract more customers than the negative PR. Of course, they're also
attracting a lawsuit from other companies.

I don't know what they're smoking.

------
themodelplumber
When you are spending almost $7B a year on shipping, and your customers are
only paying $3B for said shipping, it's time to start padding the Prime
features so you can take advantage of the good will when you make necessary
adjustments later.

~~~
eco
Interesting. Where'd you get those figures? I googled around a bit but came up
short.

~~~
themodelplumber
They're in here, see 3:45.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q)

------
Aissen
OVH tried to do that with their Hubic service, and people were just abusing
the limits, sending in data from multiple machines 24/7
([https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ovh.com%2Ffr%2Fa895.hubic_une_premiere_annee_epique&edit-
text=) ) . They now limit at 10TB for the old "unlimited" price.

This might explain this clause:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908)

------
akrymski
"Unlimited" should be banned from advertising slogans. It's like an "all you
can eat" buffet that kicks out the customers that eat too much. It's a trick
that companies employ because nobody reads their TOCs that let them kick out
power users. It's misleading advertising. Why not promise people 100TB of
storage? Because then you'd actually have to live up to your promises. Since
living up to promises of "unlimited" data isn't feasible, this strategy should
be banned. Same goes for Yahoo! Mail and their "unlimited" storage.

------
badusername
I can't see how Dropbox wouldn't end up getting crushed in this fight. Just
recently, they reclaimed all the promo/referral/college storage I had, and
shrunk my space from 40GB to 15GB. Pay up $10 per month or lose all your data.

I shopped around, and got a $2 per month from Google Drive. The product is
pretty much on parity with Dropbox on the Mac, and works exactly the same way.
Yes, I'll take that 80% discount, thank you.

~~~
cjoh
It's mostly, right now, because Amazon's desktop software is _so_ bad. Whereas
with Dropbox and Google Drive, I can simply save files to a directory on my
computer and can be assured that Dropbox/Drive are uploading them
automatically and keeping them in sync, with Amazon, they seem to have
forgotten about Sync all together. There are files that I add to the cloud.
Should I need to work on them again, then I download them from the cloud, edit
them, and add them back.

This workflow sucks, and it's worth paying to not have to do that.

------
movingahead
All cloud storage services offer unlimited storage in one form or another. It
will be interesting to see who comes up with the most seamless solution for
managing limited on device memory storage with unlimited storage on the cloud.
Users may also want different files to be synced on different devices. I have
only used Dropbox among all of these services, and its current manual
Selective Sync is a clumsy way to manage data.

------
natch
Is this a drive, or storage?

In other words, do I have to have one corresponding drive on my system, and
the storage is limited to at most the size of that one physical drive?

------
JamesBaxter
Could Amazon put the squeeze on Dropbox by raising the price of S3?

Would that be a shot in the foot due to a reduction in sales for S3 but worth
it to get into cloud storage?

~~~
imaginenore
I would be surprised if Dropbox hasn't looked at the alternatives.

S3 is pretty expensive as is.

~~~
davidu
There is no way Dropbox is paying stock S3 pricing.

------
SilasX
Isn't this just begging people to find the actual limits? Couldn't Dropbox cut
their own costs by using the unlimited service, and then make money on
offering better service? Would amazon just throttle them in response, or ...?

Edit; ivank found the catch, a few minutes before I posted this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908)

------
borgia
I don't trust Amazon from a privacy point of view so I'm certainly not going
to be hosting private files on their servers.

I like Dropbox because it does basically one thing and does it well. I don't
need to edit docs, collaborate, etc. with it - I've Google Drive for those
purposes - but it suits me perfectly for my core backup requirements and at a
price I'm not too bothered by.

~~~
SXX
If you using Dropbox you already host your private files on Amazon S3 servers.

You better use client-side encryption if you want to keep your files safe.

------
liyanage
I love the Dropbox service, but if Amazon will provide iOS and Mac clients
that work well and the Mac client turns out to be less of a CPU hog than the
awful Dropbox Mac client, I'll switch right away.

Dropbox is constantly the second highest average energy user over the last 8
hours on my laptop, impacting battery life. It shows up high on the CPU usage
list all the time.

------
PlzSnow
Amazon Cloud Drive is useless because it has no synchronization. You need to
manually upload and download files whenever they change.

Useless!

------
TorKlingberg
The other tech giants (Google, Microsoft, Apple) already have consumer cloud
storage services, so I am not surprised to see Amazon launching one too.

Now I just hope there will be a standard for mobile apps to use cloud storage,
to get out of this swamp with each app integrating with storage services
individually.

~~~
saturdaysaint
This isn't a new service - the cheap/unlimited pricing is what's new.

------
xxcode
I just looked at the Box stock. Google Finance says institutional ownership of
0%. Never seen something like this before - perhaps gFinance has buggy data or
else the smart money is not on Box. Perhaps similar story on Dropbox. Not sure
when their IPO is, but I hear the rumblings of it.

~~~
Cookingboy
I think vast majority of Box's IPO buyers were institutional investors (not
counting their existing investors before the IPO). Maybe the reports are not
filed yet or Google hasn't aggregated recent data.

------
SXX
What's happen when trial access expire? Will files remain accessible without
payment?

I know that Google Drive don't allow to uploads until you pay for storage or
remove files that above limit, but they're still available. Interesting what
happen in case of Amazon.

------
nickbauman
It's not going after Google Drive as it has no content application offering.
Google Drive has a comprehensive one: create spreadsheets and all kinds of
other documents _in_ the cloud. Collaborate on those documents using apps such
as Hangouts, G+, GMail.

------
eropple
This looks promising, down the line, to replace Dropbox (which I use for
things I don't care about or don't need to collaborage on--SpiderOak Hive for
everything else). But I think I want to see it exist for some length of time
before jumping on it.

~~~
simplexion
I got the Spideroak unlimited deal when that existed. I don't think I will be
changing anytime soon. The client-side encryption is greatness and makes the
cost very easy to live with.

------
rckclmbr
I'm actually upset by this -- I'm on the $10/year for 20gb plan (I use
unlimited photos, the 20gb are just home videos). I'm sure Amazon figured
there would be a few people like me who wouldn't like this, but it still
sucks.

------
lucasmullens
"covering all kinds of media from videos and music through to PDF documents"

Do they not just accept all files? This makes me think there's a set list of
filetypes.

------
jscheel
The photo side could be good for my phone's photos, but not for my real
photography. I have to have sync for photos that I am actually going to do
work on.

------
coryfklein
I don't have a lot to say about the OP, but I can say that this thread is 100%
more enjoyable to read after installing the Cloud to Butt extension.

------
sreitshamer
I'm adding support for this to Arq (my backup app) right now. Unlimited
backups for $5/month with no data transfer fees sounds awesome to me!

------
selter01
OneDrive already offers unlimited storage!

------
sidcool
Amazingly, the top comment on this post discusses philosophy of mortality,
based on the ToS of corporations.

------
sanmon3186
Not sure what would have gone in deciding that they don't need anything
between 5GB and unlimited.

------
Fastidious
I have not played with Amazon Cloud Drive yet, does it allows for selective
synchronization?

------
prapam2
Seems very good for archival storage. But then what becomes of Glacier
storage?

------
hashmymustache
Does any service allow me to stop syncing node_modules folders?

~~~
cnt0
Hi,

On MEO Cloud ([https://meocloud.pt/downloads](https://meocloud.pt/downloads)),
you can create a .cloudignore file in the root of the main sync folder. The
syntax is the same as .gitignore files. ([http://git-
scm.com/docs/gitignore](http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore)).

Cheers.

------
samx18
Still cannot share folders on AWS Cloud Drive :(

------
msoad
I have Amazon Prime yet I'm paying for Google $2/mo to keep my photos. Google+
features for photos are just awesome!

------
edwintorok
how about bandwidth bills? is there a flat fee for those?

------
elb0w
I wonder how much it would hurt gmail if amazon offered their own version.

~~~
tracker1
I'd actually like something more like thunderbird/gmail for multiple accounts,
where the storage/client is mine, but the imap accounts it connects to are on
other services, with multiple account support...

