Ahhhh - the joys of a price war. Awesome for consumers (at least in the short term), great for market share building but frankly pretty crap for the bottom line. And something that is a regular feature of the cloud file sharing space.
Today it was the turn of Google to slash prices on its Drive product - out of the Googleplex came the news that the 100GB plan, previously $4.99 per month, is going to be priced at $1.99. Or for those who have higher storage needs - 1TB of sweet loving Google storage will cost a miserly $9.99 per month.
They're aiming squarely at soon-to-be-publicly-traded Dropbox, the most successful consumer file sharing service on the planet. It's own pricing is set at $9.99 per month for only 100GB. Of course that's today and I fully expect an email from Dropbox's PR folks advising moves to counter the Google challenge.
Box is currently starting their pricing at $5 per month for 100GB while Microsoft's OneDrive product (yes, it was SkyDrive last week) starts at $25 per year for 50GB of storage.
Of course it's not really apples with apples since Google's huge advantage is that storage can be used across a number of properties - as well as Drive it can be used for Gmail and Google+ Photos - making Drive a pretty compelling proposition for folks who live their life across Google's various tools.
Price wars are ultimately a destructive thing - bad for the vendors, bad for the ecosystem and, over the long term, bad for customers. But in the mean time, it's all popcorn for the punditry, and in this Wild West of the cloud, there's savings to be made!
