“Last weekend, Google declared all-out war on its cloud-storage rivals and announced new pricing for its Drive service,” Josh Wolonick reports for Minyanville.
“On the low end of Google’s new offerings, users can access 100GB of storage space for just $1.99 per month, while the amount of free space has tripled to 15GB,” Wolonick reports. “By comparison, Dropbox charges $9.99 per month for for 100GB while Apple’s iCloud service costs $20 per year for 15GB and $100 per year for 15GB [sic] [recte $20/year for 10GB, $40/year for 20GB, $100/year for 50GB].”
“Because Google is now obviously winning in the price fight, it has real hopes of gaining a market share advantage in a field that has been very competitive: Last year, Apple’s iCloud held 27% of the market, followed by Dropbox at 17%, and Google Drive at 10%,” Wolonick reports. “Google’s cloud services are generally reliable — but not always. Yesterday, many people who use Google apps for work experienced a disruption to service of Google Chat, Hangout (video messaging), and Sheets (the spreadsheet app in Google Drive). The company is always very quick to address these issues, but they’ve happened before (just two months ago, a technical problem left users without Gmail and Google Talk for 15 minutes), and they’ll happen again. These small issues may not seem overly significant, but when thousands to millions of users are affected at once, an outage can easily become a big problem.”
Read more in the full article here.