Jeff Bezos is using Bill Gates' playbook from the 1990's: build alternatives to the most popular apps on your platform; bundle them; and improve app quality over time. This business strategy is very hard for a company like dropbox to compete against, even if they have better IP/quality/features.
Edit: we can also expect Amazon versions of "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply" and "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".
One big thing Zacolo has over Dropbox is cheaper pricing. Dropbox for Business is $15/mo [1] per user (can be up to 30% cheaper if you pay in-full for a year), where-as Zacolo is $5/mo [2] per user. That'll put downward pressure on Dropbox's corporate pricing unless they have much better service, or much better features, than Amazon.
I'm a dropbox customer. I'll be staying with them for the foreseeable future, but I'm glad to see competition might bring me more space and/or cheaper pricing.
Afaik, it's not competitively priced for large volume. We priced around 650 users for box, and it came out to be roughly $8K annually. At $5/month/user, the Amazon offering would be roughly $40K annually. I'd actually prefer to go the Amazon route, but they're going to have to offer volume discounts to make it compelling.
It was anticompetitive for Microsoft in the mid-90s because they had a very solid monopoly over the personal computer operating system market. A case against Amazon would be much weaker because they don't even have a majority of the market much less a monopoly.
Looks like for years, we've been saying that Amazon will likely try and compete with Dropbox and Box. Looks like that time has come.
Having used Dropbox for personal stuff, and Box for work stuff, I have to say, neither has completely fit my needs.
Sure, Dropbox is great for working within small groups/teams, and for personal syncing. Sometimes the sharing functionality gets a bit wonky, but definitely the best implementation by far.
Box works decently well in the work environment, but it is definitely clunkier than Dropbox in a lot of respects. No one liked using Box where I worked (FB).
On my own, I've found that the most of my clients don't use any of these. In fact, they still try to run things on FTP sites! As a result, I've had to adapt to them and use Citrix ShareFile. It actually serves a different purpose than Dropbox or Box. It's a drop-in replacement for sending/receiving files to people within and outside your organization. I can silo off folders to specific users, companies, etc. I can send a link to folks asking them to upload files to me. It's definitely fit the bill in a lot of respects.
So internally, I still use Dropbox. But I don't expose that externally to my clients.
It seems that Amazon Zocalo is trying to compete with Google Drive, by allowing you to edit files in the browser, and integrate with your existing IT infrastructure. Not a bad tactic, but I think the service that will do really well in enterprise is one that merges the functionality of ShareFile into Dropbox, with IT integration.
I'm enjoying pydio for file sharing outside of our lan. Its a FOSS LAMP app and its pretty slick. I put it on one of our Linodes and off we go. No need to pay for some cumbersome licensing or yet another cloud provider per app/user.
I was just at the keynote in NYC. I didn't hear them mention anything about allowing you to edit files in the browser. The only thing I saw demonstrated was preview of documents with comments collaboration but no create/update functionality. It felt like a read-only version of Google docs with commenting.
I wonder how this new AWS service is going to interact with Amazon Cloud Drive as they seem to be similar products but one is aimed at Consumers and the other is aimed at the Enterprise.
I tried using Box for a similar reason (I needed a way to securely share multiple files and/or folders with external clients in a way that did not require them to install software or sign-up for some service) and it just doesn't work. I also desired a way to automatically upload new content to this platoform.
No dice. After emailing with 6 different Box employees (all ignoring my requests and trying to sell me on shit I didn't ask for, then would just pass me onto someone else) I was finally told that I could only do that if I paid for an enterprise "call for pricing" license.
Sigh. I'm using a http-auth secured index-of directory for now. If anyone has a superior suggestion, I'm all ears.
One alternative: ownCloud running on a vps. I have a 500gb plan with vpsdime for US$7/month (and you can upgrade up to 2tb).
owncloud 7 is just to be released in one or two weeks with several improvements, including server to server sharing.
The hangup is, Dropbox does a pretty good job of being invisible, while in my experience creating slick software is one of Amazon's greatest weaknesses.
I -hated- my time with Box. It was extremely confusing to use and terrible to find things once I closed the tab and returned. I remember always feeling lost.
You're not the only one. I know so many people who are forced to use Box at notable tech companies in SF and absolutely hated it compared to using Dropbox.
We use Accellion Kiteworks [1] at my place of employment, serving much the same purpose as you describe for Citrix ShareFile. Works very, very well as an FTP replacement.
This is a move against SharePoint Online/Box/EMC's shitty thing. The proof will be how well it works.
Box can work well enough if you've got everyone on it and you're using it as your main file server. The problem is that if you want to use it with users who expect it to work like Dropbox, it's not really designed for that kind of nimble access.
The pricing is totally inline with the competitors on a per-seat basis. It's even cheaper if you have any of the think client instances.
Interesting to see how it plays out -- and what impact this will have on Box, now that it is delaying its IPO.
Please please please let companies use this instead of SharePoint. Anything sane.
Ah well, probably the kind of people who make "enterprise" buying decisions will not even SEE Zocalo on their perception radar, so it will never happen.
So I should have clarified, my experience is not with Syncolicity but with Documentum. Syncolicity might be great. Documentum, however, is/was just god awful.
I wonder how long it's going to be before Dropbox announces another vertical. They have an amazing product, but it's basically been unchanged for years now and been allowed to succeed (and thrive!) as such because competitors have always treated their own Dropbox-style clients as a hobby instead of a product.
I use Copy for storing photos since it gives a lot of free space. The client is more or less identical to Dropbox's. I can barely tell the difference between the popup for Dropbox and the popup for Copy, and it works the same. I wrote a post comparing prices and features: http://mkronline.com/2014/06/05/dropbox-vs-copy-a-comparison...
I disagree that the product has been unchanged for years. Their app syncs photos on my phone, the shared link gives a great preview of files (esp videos), they've got a strong API for developers and they're improving picture sharing.
These may seem like little changes to one product but they're making it a rock solid product in one vertical that is slowly creeping out into others.
Okay, it's fairly off-topic, but after reading that I had to respond. I consider the shared link a serious anti-feature compared to the old direct link, I suppose due to poor engineering.
- For pictures: There is no way to see the full resolution without clicking the download link. Fine for photos, no good for the screenshots I like to upload.
- For PDFs: uses pdf.js. That would be nice if I were still using Adobe Reader, not so much in Safari where I have a superior reader built in.
I don't see what Carousel does that Dropbox didn't do already. Dropbox app already backs up all photos, allows me to browse them and to share them with others.
Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service (I'm comparing the monthly 100gb plan), yet they can't lower the price because they likely have a massive number of customers who are fine with paying $10 / month and/or don't know about cheaper competitors...so the price will likely stay put until they start to see signs of their existing base churning out, but by then their competitors may already have won over a lot of mindshare.
The thing is that there is no competition to Dropbox that works equally well. It's like saying 'BMW is feeling the heat from all those Dacia's being sold'. No they're not, they're in different markets, providing a premium product for a premium price. People who care about 10$ / month for something that they presumably use every day are customers you need to drop asap anyway.
Well for my purposes, and this is subjective, google drive works equally well. Granted I may not need all the features that dropbox offers anyway. However, google seems to be quickly coming up to par with the rest of dropbox's offerings, and in the long run as cloud storage becomes more and more of a commodity the only differentiator will be price.
>Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service
Care to name some of the competitors?
Besides Google Drive, I mean, which I won't use (tried it, and it was crap compared to Amazon, but am trying to avoid Google in general, and I don't want to encourage their bundling of Google Apps with the Drive).
Google Drive, OneDrive, and now it looks like amazon is throwing their hat into the ring. These are all cheaper options. I switched to google drive from dropbox without a problem.
> Gotta love Amazon, at $5/user/month that is 1/3rd the price of Dropbox for business
Or, probably more relevantly, exactly the same price as the limited-storage tier of Google Apps for Business when the latter is paid monthly, but with 6+ times as much storage, and half the price (again, using monthly rather than annual pricing) of the Google Apps for Business unlimited storage + Vault offering.
Google Apps does, however, offer slightly lower prices with annual commitment, and I don't see anything in the Amazon Zocalo description that makes it clear that it has any compelling features that Google Apps doesn't (it seems like its just a competitor to Drive with enterprise admin tools of the type Google also seems to have in its Google Apps for Business offering, at least at the higher tier, without any of the other things that come with Google Apps.)
Dropbox is in a challenging situation. They've grown too large for an exit and without large partner, they are fighting an uphill battle againt giants like Google, Apple and Amazon. I would not bet on them.
Count the number of times that a company has hosted with AWS, gotten reasonably (or very) successful, and then had Amazon enter their vertical and completely undercut them. Netflix and now Dropbox, at least.
And still startups flock to AWS like it's mana from heaven.
Both Amazon and Dropbox Business seem to provide 200 GB/user (although DropBox claims you can request more, whatever that means (free?)).
It is hard to say how they compare on functionality (e.g. versioning, auditing, integration (e.g. Kerberos, AD, etc)). The Amazon web-site is very light on details. It isn't even clear if Amazon has some kind of desktop sync application which is DropBox's bread and butter.
I'd need to wait for a LOT more information on Amazon's offering before jumping ship. Things like versioning (rollbacks, etc) are non-negotiable for many business users and while Amazon's offering might have that the web-site could do a better job letting us know as much.
"You can install the Zocalo client application on your desktop and laptop computers running Windows 7 or MacOS (version 10.7 or later) and designate a folder for syncing. Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices. You can also access Zocalo from your iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets."
Yeah seriously. Cheaper and it looks like there is more functionality, unless Dropbox provides collaborative editing tools(I haven't used anything beyond the simple sync with dropbox).
If anything, I hope this pressures Dropbox to lower their pricing or add a lower-priced tier. I think they're leaving money on the table with more casual users who would gladly pay $5 for a bit more space, but balk at $10/month for 100GB of space when they only need 10GB.
How is Box significantly cheaper? Box is $5 / seat for 100GB, with a cap of 10 users at that tier - if you want more than 10 users in an organization you have to buy in at the $15 / seat price point. Zocalo's $5 / seat for 200GB is a pretty good value in the enterprise space.
Since the more literal meaning is "base" or "plinth", I guess they want Amazon Zocalo to be both the foundation and center of your document collaboration infrastructure just as the Zocalo in Mexico City once was the center for collaboration and discussion.
Readit News
Edit: we can also expect Amazon versions of "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply" and "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/business/buy [2] https://aws.amazon.com/zocalo/pricing/
Having used Dropbox for personal stuff, and Box for work stuff, I have to say, neither has completely fit my needs.
Sure, Dropbox is great for working within small groups/teams, and for personal syncing. Sometimes the sharing functionality gets a bit wonky, but definitely the best implementation by far.
Box works decently well in the work environment, but it is definitely clunkier than Dropbox in a lot of respects. No one liked using Box where I worked (FB).
On my own, I've found that the most of my clients don't use any of these. In fact, they still try to run things on FTP sites! As a result, I've had to adapt to them and use Citrix ShareFile. It actually serves a different purpose than Dropbox or Box. It's a drop-in replacement for sending/receiving files to people within and outside your organization. I can silo off folders to specific users, companies, etc. I can send a link to folks asking them to upload files to me. It's definitely fit the bill in a lot of respects.
So internally, I still use Dropbox. But I don't expose that externally to my clients.
It seems that Amazon Zocalo is trying to compete with Google Drive, by allowing you to edit files in the browser, and integrate with your existing IT infrastructure. Not a bad tactic, but I think the service that will do really well in enterprise is one that merges the functionality of ShareFile into Dropbox, with IT integration.
http://pyd.io/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def?ie=UTF8&*Ve...
It does Desktop folder syncing just like dropbox.
I wonder how this new AWS service is going to interact with Amazon Cloud Drive as they seem to be similar products but one is aimed at Consumers and the other is aimed at the Enterprise.
No dice. After emailing with 6 different Box employees (all ignoring my requests and trying to sell me on shit I didn't ask for, then would just pass me onto someone else) I was finally told that I could only do that if I paid for an enterprise "call for pricing" license.
Sigh. I'm using a http-auth secured index-of directory for now. If anyone has a superior suggestion, I'm all ears.
https://insynchq.com
I'm a co-founder.
EMC Syncplicity is targeting that usecase (no idea how well it works, yet).
[1] http://www.accellion.com/
Box can work well enough if you've got everyone on it and you're using it as your main file server. The problem is that if you want to use it with users who expect it to work like Dropbox, it's not really designed for that kind of nimble access.
The pricing is totally inline with the competitors on a per-seat basis. It's even cheaper if you have any of the think client instances.
Interesting to see how it plays out -- and what impact this will have on Box, now that it is delaying its IPO.
Ah well, probably the kind of people who make "enterprise" buying decisions will not even SEE Zocalo on their perception radar, so it will never happen.
These may seem like little changes to one product but they're making it a rock solid product in one vertical that is slowly creeping out into others.
- For pictures: There is no way to see the full resolution without clicking the download link. Fine for photos, no good for the screenshots I like to upload.
- For PDFs: uses pdf.js. That would be nice if I were still using Adobe Reader, not so much in Safari where I have a superior reader built in.
Care to name some of the competitors?
Besides Google Drive, I mean, which I won't use (tried it, and it was crap compared to Amazon, but am trying to avoid Google in general, and I don't want to encourage their bundling of Google Apps with the Drive).
Or, probably more relevantly, exactly the same price as the limited-storage tier of Google Apps for Business when the latter is paid monthly, but with 6+ times as much storage, and half the price (again, using monthly rather than annual pricing) of the Google Apps for Business unlimited storage + Vault offering.
Google Apps does, however, offer slightly lower prices with annual commitment, and I don't see anything in the Amazon Zocalo description that makes it clear that it has any compelling features that Google Apps doesn't (it seems like its just a competitor to Drive with enterprise admin tools of the type Google also seems to have in its Google Apps for Business offering, at least at the higher tier, without any of the other things that come with Google Apps.)
And still startups flock to AWS like it's mana from heaven.
It is hard to say how they compare on functionality (e.g. versioning, auditing, integration (e.g. Kerberos, AD, etc)). The Amazon web-site is very light on details. It isn't even clear if Amazon has some kind of desktop sync application which is DropBox's bread and butter.
I'd need to wait for a LOT more information on Amazon's offering before jumping ship. Things like versioning (rollbacks, etc) are non-negotiable for many business users and while Amazon's offering might have that the web-site could do a better job letting us know as much.
"You can install the Zocalo client application on your desktop and laptop computers running Windows 7 or MacOS (version 10.7 or later) and designate a folder for syncing. Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices. You can also access Zocalo from your iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets."
This post has some more details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/zocalo-doc-storage-sharing/
Also it looks like Box and Google Drive are significantly cheaper.
Though I guess not as terrible as SOPA (stick you beat someone with), or PIPA (he is touching me in inappropriate places).
And CISA which sounds like cyst in all languages.
If you're familiar/know the place, it makes sense why they named it that.
Must make Babylon5 reference: http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo
Or you can reference the real origin of the word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo
It doesn't really look like this Amazon product fits the word being used.
Socket is assumed if no context.
I have never heard of it used as 'tile'. A tile is 'baldoza'.