We're all bombarded with mobile phone plans offering more and more minutes or more and more data for a standard monthly fee, and with ISP's offering phenomenal amounts of data - the 150Gb for $70/mo crew, all of whom do so in the knowledge that 90% of their client base won't use it and that the other 10% can be slugged with punitive excess usage fees the moment they step out of their allocation.
The point being that once you have excess capacity, enough to accomodate the outliers, you can start supersizing your offerings and in the process get people to pay for more than they need becuase it looks like such a good deal (just the same way supermarkets offer you six, as opposed to four, cents off a litre of fuel if you spend more than $150 in a single transaction)
Interestingly I think we're on the edge of seeing this with 'free' storage: Windows Live offers you a massive 25GB - probably more than most people will use, iCloud 5GB, Google is reputed to be about to offer a 5Gb Gdrive and Dropbox 2Gb with sync. There are others, such as Box with similar offerings. Evernote bases costs on usage, not data stored.
Now when my work mac slowly borked itself I burned myself a dvd of my documents and desktop - it came to just over 4 Gb for six years worth of work and projects. Embarrassingly the downloads folder came to just under 25Gb - just showing how bad I've been at cleaning out pdf's and drafts of shared documents. (The other lesson is that using de facto standard document formats, doc(x), odt, xls, ods, pdf is a really good thing)
But what we can draw from this is that for someone using their machine for work and creating a lot of text based documents (as opposed to movies or images) you need somewhere between 5 and 25GB, ie you are unlikely to fill the hard disk of any modern laptop during the lifetime of the machine. What's more, unless you work intensively with images, video and sound you are unlikely to accumulate more than ten times the average, which is still less than a disks worth.
So, people who are disorganised and profligate, like me, could happily use current free cloud storage for their work over a reasonable time without bumping into usage restrictions.
The implication is that provided one has reasonable connectivity a syncing storage model like dropbox or evernote is perfectly tenable, as is working with cloud based storage and applications, meaning that one doesn't need that much locally, making the use of low capacity machines such as tablets or netbooks a viable computing option ...
The point being that once you have excess capacity, enough to accomodate the outliers, you can start supersizing your offerings and in the process get people to pay for more than they need becuase it looks like such a good deal (just the same way supermarkets offer you six, as opposed to four, cents off a litre of fuel if you spend more than $150 in a single transaction)
Interestingly I think we're on the edge of seeing this with 'free' storage: Windows Live offers you a massive 25GB - probably more than most people will use, iCloud 5GB, Google is reputed to be about to offer a 5Gb Gdrive and Dropbox 2Gb with sync. There are others, such as Box with similar offerings. Evernote bases costs on usage, not data stored.
Now when my work mac slowly borked itself I burned myself a dvd of my documents and desktop - it came to just over 4 Gb for six years worth of work and projects. Embarrassingly the downloads folder came to just under 25Gb - just showing how bad I've been at cleaning out pdf's and drafts of shared documents. (The other lesson is that using de facto standard document formats, doc(x), odt, xls, ods, pdf is a really good thing)
But what we can draw from this is that for someone using their machine for work and creating a lot of text based documents (as opposed to movies or images) you need somewhere between 5 and 25GB, ie you are unlikely to fill the hard disk of any modern laptop during the lifetime of the machine. What's more, unless you work intensively with images, video and sound you are unlikely to accumulate more than ten times the average, which is still less than a disks worth.
So, people who are disorganised and profligate, like me, could happily use current free cloud storage for their work over a reasonable time without bumping into usage restrictions.
The implication is that provided one has reasonable connectivity a syncing storage model like dropbox or evernote is perfectly tenable, as is working with cloud based storage and applications, meaning that one doesn't need that much locally, making the use of low capacity machines such as tablets or netbooks a viable computing option ...
5 comments:
$150/mth for 170gb doesn't sound great to me. I'd expect unlimited (but shaped at peak time) for that.
With streaming video services, 170gb/mth won't be enough before long. A couple of TVs streaming HDTV + a laptop or two + some streaming audio would soon make serious inroads into that.
And that's without starting BitTorrent :)
Also 5gb isn't going to be enough even for basic use unless things like music are kept elsewhere.
What? You don't keep your music on your work laptop? Most poeple do :)
You've either misread or mistyped your response $70 not $170 -not as bad as it sounds - $70 for $150Gb, with no peak /offpeak spilt.
In general the infrastructure isn't up to HDTV so its a non issue - we're hanging out for the NBN and another round of ISP price wars ...
personally I do keep my music, my ebooks and my photographs elsewhere than my work laptop.
5Gb or ever 25GB isn't enogh for a music collection but clearly enough for work related stuff. However double the storage to 50Gb and you're getting close for most people ...
Interestingly Microsoft have reduced the default allocation in Skydrive from 25GB to 7GB - their reasoning (and some supporting data) are onlive at http://t.co/5za470eV
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