Following Microsoft's recent relaunch of SkyDrive as OneDrive, Google has thrown down the gauntlet in the cloud storage market by reducing the prices of its own platform. The drops are significant too.
Gizmag recently ran a cloud storage comparison guide in which, for their first increments of paid storage offered, Amazon Cloud Drive and Microsoft OneDrive were shown to offer a value of 24 GB per dollar per month. Google Drive came in just behind them at 20 GB per dollar per month. It's new price structure sees Drive improve that figure by a factor of 2.5, offering 50 GB per dollar per month.
Drive users can now receive 100 GB of storage for US$1.99 per month (previously $4.99 per month), 1 TB of storage for $9.99 per month (previously $49.99 per month) and 10+ TB starting at $99.99 per month. The amount of space offered for free stays the same, at 15 GB.
Google is clearly asserting its dominant position as cloud computing becomes more mainstream and the move is likely to force other cloud storage providers to follow suit in cutting their prices, but the extent to which it will be possible for providers with less clout behind them, like Dropbox, remains to be seen.
Source: Google
