The Cloud Wars.

 
Adobe recently announce that “every­one can join the Cre­ative Cloud,” and while cus­tomers will have access to a free mem­ber­ship to explore cer­tain fea­tures, a monthly price of US$50 (based on a one-year sub­scrip­tion) has been set. The idea is that users can access the lat­est ver­sion of Adobe’s pop­u­lar pro­grams (like Pho­to­shop CS6 and Light­room 4), with­out  buy­ing the boxed ver­sion and sub­se­quent upgrades. In addi­tion to receiv­ing updates to the pro­grams as soon as they are released, users also get 20GB of cloud stor­age for sync­ing their work.

On Ama­zon, Adobe Pho­to­shop CS5 costs around $639. With a yearly sub­scrip­tion you save about $40. Not an amaz­ing deal if you need to use the soft­ware every day, but you could  “rent” it for $50/month, and only use it when you need to meet a dead­line, and then stop pay­ing while you are work­ing on some­thing else. The idea is good on paper, but I am not com­pletely sold on the ben­e­fits of a sub­scrip­tion sys­tem. Unfor­tu­nately, I believe that there’s no turn­ing back. This is how we will be buy­ing and using soft­ware in the near future.

At the same time Adobe set the “Cre­ative Cloud” pric­ing, Ama­zon low­ered their S3 stor­age rates. Small busi­nesses with fairly typ­i­cal 50 TB of data capac­ity, will see a 12% reduc­tion in costs. Big­ger com­pa­nies stor­ing up to 500 TB of data will enjoy a 13.5% reduc­tion in costs.

Ama­zon has been claim­ing that their sys­tem gives users an advan­tage over tra­di­tional IT, and the cur­rent price cut is a really good exam­ple. The num­ber of files stored in S3 increased to 762 bil­lion dur­ing the last three months of 2011, com­pared to 262 bil­lion dur­ing the same period in 2010, accord­ing to the com­pany. Inter­est­ingly, Ama­zon rents out its net­work to com­pa­nies such as Drop­box, Smug­Mug, Net­flix, and social game com­pany Zynga, among many, many, many others.

Google’s long-rumored GDrive seems to be just weeks away. Accord­ing to reli­able sources,  the new prod­uct will be free to con­sumers up to a cer­tain size limit, and would also be folded into Google Apps for busi­ness. GDrive will defin­i­tively hurt smaller com­pa­nies like Drop­box, which offers a 2GB free ver­sion and monthly plans of $10 for 50GB and $20 for 100GB. Just in case you missed it, Drop­box has been run­ning a promo: you get 500MB for free when you upload pho­tos and videos using their (beta) uploader, which auto­mat­i­cally pulls media from any cam­era, smart­phone, or SD card and drops it into the cloud. Repeat the process until you hit 5GB of free space. I’m pretty sure they are feel­ing Google’s steps approach­ing and are try­ing to get as many cus­tomers hooked asap.

If you have an Acer lap­top (I haven’t seen one in years!) you can also try the Acer­Cloud, which allows remote access to any machine, even if it is asleep or in hiber­na­tion mode, and even if it is not con­nected to the same Wi-Fi net­work. Stor­age is unlim­ited, users can upload music, pho­tos, videos, and doc­u­ments, and it is free. Sounds like magic.

The cloud com­put­ing busi­ness is get­ting seri­ous. World­wide, $830 mil­lion was spent on such file and backup stor­age ser­vices in 2011, and that fig­ure is expected to grow by 47% to $1.2 bil­lion this year, accord­ing to Gart­ner Inc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 22:30. It is filed under Analysis, Business, Consulting, Marketing, Technology and tagged with Acer, Adobe, Amazon, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Dropbox, Google, Google Apps, Lightroom 4, Netflix, Photoshop CS6. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.