We all love a bargain. Free offerings and heavily discounted pricing of cloud storage is the trend in town. The pricing war between AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace, Apple, Box, DropBox and numerous other current and emerging cloud players is very intense. I think it is getting to a point that soon you could be paid cash to store your files on their platforms.
The race to zero as its called could get there sooner than we think. It may even go further into negative territory in the form of consumers earning money to store data. I would love that. User generated content is definitely valuable and worth the money.
The real deal is what companies are trying to get you to buy by offering storage for free. The race to zero has changed marketing, offerings and perception of value massively. Cloud is actually for the benefit of big players. The bigger youare the more you make and the huge you become.
Look at apple for an example. Their rise in terms of brand, stock price and influence is dramatic. How many apps and services offered by them for a fee are free now. Operating system, productivity tools and storage all have freemium pricing. Look at pebble, Apple watch, Microsoft watch and a few more out there. After iWatch’s announcement Pebble has changed their tag line recently to something sounds like the most affordable watch.
Microsoft released free office apps on all platforms recently and they were topping the charts in most app stores. Microsoft is seriously going cross platform, open source and giving away dev tools to attract more developers to .NET platform.
If we look at DropBox, which runs on AWS they are now rushing to innovate thanks to Amazon competing with its own customer by offering similar but much cheaper offering.
This pricing war is real and serious. Big players relying on winning big market share in Asia knows, In Asia, you haggle. Works like a charm when your buying power is big. This is going to change and challenge the value perceived in everything everywhere. The Race to Zero is going to impact everyone and Innovation is the currency in this Asian century.
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