

The Unlimited Web - jnfr
http://jnfr.posterous.com/the-unlimited-web

======
TMK
The internet is not free or unlimited. There exists bandwith limits because
the cables can't take more than that. There exists hard disk limits, because
hard disks cost. Any business who is offering something unlimited is taking a
risk and trying to keep up with the need of space by adding more space when
customers use space.

The price of 50GB storage is not free, it does cost but only about 3 Dollars
according to the first 1TB hard drive which came up from DuckDuckGo. In this
1TB hard drive you can store 50GB partitions for 20 users. If the hard drive
cost's 60 dollars then it's 3 dollars per user. So to say drop box is making
about 6 dollars profit from 50GB accounts though the over all profit depends
on the amount of free accounts. Box.net took huge risk to steal dropbox users
with the free 50GB accounts.

After it's in the amounts of tens of thousands users the 50GB free account is
not really a free anymore. The space for 10k users is 500TB and cost is 30,000
dollars.

So it is not free nor unlimited. Get that idea out of your head right away.

~~~
jnfr
Thanks for pointing out some places where my article may have been
misunderstood. I agree with you that there is definitely overhead for box.net
to be providing the 50GB free for new users and I will re-iterate my point
that I definitely believe that they will eventually profit from the risk they
took. The point I was trying to make was less on the price but more on the
rate at which the web is expanding in the sense of space and what we set as
limits and caps.

Comparing how things were less than a decade about and now (with web hosting
plans, gmail's release) suggests a growing trend that the web is quickly
becoming "unlimited", and this sense of "unlimited" is quickly becoming the
norm. The gripe I was trying to express with the article was how some
companies fail to see that by continuing to quantify the resources available
to users.

~~~
TMK
I have to agree that the sense of the web being "unlimited" is becoming the
norm, though the web will never be unlimited unless we break light speed and
find a way to store unlimited data.

