This post points to a concrete example of Chris Anderson's thoughts in his second book, Free: The future of a radical price in which he discussed the inexorable tendency of prices for digital, electronic items (or bytes) to decrease to the point of "free." In this case, storage, lots of it, is now free.
"Introducing Google Drive... yes, really"
Official Gmail Blog, April 24, 2012
count: 2 pages
It hasn't been that long since Steve Jobs was one of the few individuals who could afford this much storage.With last week's Google announcment of Google Drive, its free online storage for all sorts of digital files, the world saw the first real competitor to DropBox.
Similar to DropBox, Google provides 5 GB (gigabytes) of storage for free, and even more, this storage is posited in the online collaborative world of Google Docs, so as the Google blog post says,
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices.
This freemium service will be a real money-maker for Google, who is good at that sort of thing. Currently DropBox offers 2GB free, and then offers upgrades beginning at $9.99 monthly (this rate for up to 32GB if you refer lots of friends).
With Google Drive, each customer begins with 5GB, with the least-expensive upgrade priced at $2.49 per month, for 25GB. I'm expecting some immediate changes in the DropBox business model if they are to remain viable.
Is it just me? Or are we indeed seeing amazing changes, innovations, trends, and shifts throughout the digital world, in an amazingly small period of time? It's enough to make one dizzy.
Oh, post-data: The interactive banner logo on the Google Blog linked above is a lot of fun to play with.
No comments:
Post a Comment