Prices Drop as Cloud Storage Wars Heat Up
Big screen TVs, laptops, and gaming systems aren’t the only items being discounted this holiday season. Both Amazon and Google are lowering their cloud storage prices, while touting the new features of their respective services.
Google, already a major player in the cloud race, announced earlier this week that along with a 20 percent price drop, they were unveiling their “Durable Reduced Availability Storage.” TechCrunch compares the service to Amazon’s “Glacier” where stored data is archived by the storage provider and “would require some extra time to access.”
Others are speculating that due to Google’s immense amount of capital, their app marketplace, and the size of their mobile OS ecosystem, the search giant could one day pass Amazon as the global leader in cloud storage services.
Google is now offering European customers the ability to store their data locally, but some countries may be left out in the new offering. Zdnet.com reports that "Google will not let customers select exactly where in Europe their data will be stored, potentially locking out customers who must keep their data within the legislative bounds of their country."
Along with hosting its first ever "cloud conference,” Amazon has been making just as much news as its competition by offering heavily discounted S3 (Simple Storage Service) pricing and a new partnership with NetApp. Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told Wired that the company has lowered prices twenty-three times since 2006.
With prices constantly decreasing and a lack of the “financial details” needed, Antone Gonsalves of ReadWriteWeb recently discussed whether Amazon, Google, or others are actually making any money from cloud services and then explained why making a profit today might not actually be the goal.
Because this is not the core business of any of these companies, there's little pressure to make money right away on cloud services. 'It may very well be the case that these cloud platform divisions don’t have any set mandate to make a profit.'
With lower and lower prices and a variety of services, Amazon and Google both are vying for as many customers as possible—and worrying about making money somewhere down the road. Both companies hope that being number one someday means more than just a number. They're looking for a lot of numbers—preceded by a dollar sign.
