Amazon Cloud Drive Archives

After uploading all of my Amazon MP3 purchases to my Amazon Cloud Drive, I used almost all of the 5GB that Amazon provided. I felt a little cheated because I made these purchases through Amazon. Amazon is even making you offers of additional storage for new MP3 purchases. Since I can see the record of all of these “legacy” transactions on my Amazon account, why couldn’t Amazon honor these purchases?
And then it struck me: Amazon is killing many birds with a single stone.

If you purchase and leave your music on Amazon, then Amazon saves a lot of money. They can keep a single copy of the song in their storage farm. And then they just point your Cloud Drive pointer to this original content. If you have a really popular album, then they save multiple instances of storage. And these savings apply to transmission costs as well. Why download 100 or 1,00 or 10,000 copies of a song to thousands of customers? Cut out the storage costs and cut out the download costs. [Note: The transmission costs do occur on the back-end whenever you listen to the music. In fact, each time you listen to the music, you and Amazon are incurring that download.]
Amazon can layer any number of services back into this offering. They can include cover art, and all sorts of other metadata. And they can add things over time.
Amazon is storing the content – so they control it. This may not sound like much. But I suspect that this is a big deal to their content partners. For content that Amazon vends and stores, there is no real issue. But if a customer uploads content and it turns out that the content is obviously unlicensed, then Amazon has rights regarding content embargoes, content filtering and even content elimination. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon does content analysis on behalf of their content partners.

And none of these benefits accrue for older purchased content that would need to be reloaded back to Amazon.
But Amazon is risking very little by not addressing legacy purchases. They have a much bigger issue that they must address head-on: customer perception. Amazon is risking a lot based upon their belief that customers won’t mind having their content stored for them. I’m not certain if this is a good bet or not.
People get positively possessive about things that they have purchased. They want to use it in all sorts of ways. For example, I like to include song snippets in videos that I’ve bult for the kids and their sports teams. I would be upset if I had paid for content and couldn’t use it. In fact, I would consider that a violation of fair use. Not having access to this content in any way that I want (and at any time that I want) may result in some very dissatisfied customers.
For my part, I am still unsure about having “rights” to something without having anything substantial. Thus far, I only have two movies purchased via Amazon Video on Demand. [Note: I’ve also completed my first Amazon MP3 purchase that is stored exclusively on Amazon’s servers.] Yet I have dozens of digital movies on my media server. And I have hundreds of DVD and Blu-Ray discs in a cabinet. And I have thousands of digital music files on my media server. I could certainly buy more “rights” to other content that is stored off-site. But it just doesn’t seem the same to me. Proximity equals control and control equals confidence.
As I think about it, I like the Amazon Kindle model a little bit better. I do have the rights to books I’ve ordered. And I can view them anywhere – as long as I download them first. [Note: I do wonder why Amazon isn’t streaming book content as well as music content as it is less bandwidth intensive.] Either way, I feel very connected to the Kindle content – wherever it is. I think that this is because I have something to touch – i.e., the Kindle itself.
But I’m sure that Amazon customer studies have been through all of this. I am sure that they have recent data that suggests that younger customers are more comfortable with less concrete content. It’s just old farts like me that want to have something that is a little more tangible.
In a few years, all of this will be moot. Content will be stored in the cloud. And you won’t have direct and personal access to it – except via a technology broker (like Amazon). And that situation has the little “Lost in Space” robot (that is inside my head) screaming “Danger, Will Robinson.”
I am also reminded of the Doctor Who episode entitled “The Long Game.” In this episode, people have to pay for “access” to important information. The more you pay, the more “access” you receive. Surely this is not the future of computing. I certainly hope not.
-Roo

For those who have read my musings for some time, you’ll know that I use a lot of Amazon services.

I have purchased music from Amazon for many years. Why would I use Amazon’s music service when iTunes owned the market? Because I really believe in competition. And I really believe in good prices. And I really believe in digital freedom. Consequently, I’ve bought many dozens of albums from Amazon’s music service. And recently, I’ve purchased from both my home computer and my Android phone.
I’ve also used Amazon’s Video service for a few years. Amazon decided that they would boldly venture into the same market that Netflix and Blockbuster had already captured. I originally chose Amazon because they weren’t Apple. But then I began to use their service more fully. And I realized that because they weren’t Apple, they were intrinsically better.
Yeah, that’s an exaggeration. But not by much. I bought a Panasonic Blu-Ray player. And it included streaming from Amazon VOD. Because both Amazon and Panasonic had an established history of leveraging open source technologies, it was a natural harmony. And as my Viera Cast capabilities grew, so have the Amazon VOD capabilities – especially with the Amazon prime membership that my wife has.
But while I’ve had Amazon VOD for about two years, I haven’t really exploited it much until I had the right wireless infrastructure at home. Now that I have that in place, it’s been wonderful using the Amazon service. I can get almost any video I want whenever I want it. And if I choose to buy it, then Amazon has provided a video locker to store the digital content in.
Since getting my Android phone last year, I have been waiting for Amazon to open up their own Android market. This week, they finally made it official and started vending apps using their retail purchasing engine. I haven’t bought a lot of apps from them yet. But if they provide the same application re-installs that the Google market does, then I may switch my purchases to Amazon. [Note: I really love automatic reinstallation of apps from the Android market. Every time that I switch ROM’s, I need to reload my system. So this is a sticking point for me.]

I’ve used a lot of “cloud-based” storage in the past. While at Microsoft, I tinkered with SkyDrive. BTW, this was a revolutionary concept that suffered from a horrible implementation. [Note: That is quite typical for many Microsoft technologies. They can always out-market you on technology that they acquire. And they can almost always build really cool new things. But they oftentimes have trouble building and marketing first-generation technology.]
But when SkyDrive didn’t seize the market, the most notable cloud-based storage tool in the market became DropBox. DropBox got a lot of the technology right. And they really captured a chunk of the geek market. Indeed, Cindy and I have used DropBox for several years. And it has been a wonderful success whenever she has needed a collaborative storage platform for her master’s degree classwork. But like SkyDrive, DropBox never made a big enough splash in the market to begin to seize the consumer marketplace.
And now it’s Amazon’s turn.
I REALLY love the cloud storage offering that Amazon released this week. If you’ve had your head in the clouds (or had your head stuck somewhere else), then I will tell you that the Amazon service is called the Amazon Cloud Drive. I love the name. It leverages the notion of the cloud (as popularized by Microsoft ads) and adds to it the simple and well-understood notion of the “drive” as storage. Hence, Cloud Drive may well be a marketing winner.
And the Cloud Drive offering is fairly complete. You can use it on your PC or Mac. And you can use it on your phone. And you can use it on a tablet. So far, it seems to really “sing” with music-based files. Of course, that makes sense as music files are the largest commodity that will be stored. It will be months (or maybe even years) before videos will become a ubiquitous on the service. So adroit mastery of music files hits the Amazon sweet spot.
And they have chosen a good niche for the amount of free storage. It is larger than either DropBox or SkyDrive. The current offering is 5GB for free. I suspect that Apple and Google may try and best this with a 25GB offering. But we’ll have to see. The folks at Forbes think that the first major reply will be to up the storage limits. If that happens, I would bet that Amazon will respond. That might be a fun price war to watch.
So far, I really like the first volley in the impending digital storage wars. Like the folks at Forbes, I see Apple and Google jumping in on this. And I think that Google may just buy DropBox. They don’t need the DropBox tech. But they may want the customers and the buzz. But I also think that you may see some other folks jumping in. I do believe that Microsoft may burnish and re-launch SkyDrive. If they do, this might be hella fun.
And I really think that storage vendors and media player vendors are going to want to get in on the action. While they may not be able to make a complete offering themselves, it will be nice to see how they are used as channel providers to the bigger players.
So what will it take to win? Winners (and survivors) will need the following:

They will need capital to purchase and implement the vast quantities of storage that may be required.
They will need established data center management skills to make the cloud-based storage initiative viable.
They will need marketing to get the message to customers
They will need partners for channel depth and diversity of correlated features/capabilities.
They will need digital content.
They will need a retail channel (with a strong purchasing and delivery engine).

Google has many of these. I do think that they lack diverse content – although YouTube does help. What they really need is some content partners – like Sony???
Apple has some of these. Nevertheless, they lack a robust and diverse partner ecosystem. Yes, they have lots of partners. But they re so closed that they are technologically inbred. And they don’t have a lot of online storage already in their pipeline. Yes, they sell content. But they don’t really store it for their customers. They move it to their customers’ devices.
Amazon has most of these (except for the brand identity across many markets). They do have all of the pieces in place. But no one knows that. They have content. They have storage. They have the retail channel. But they need critical mind-share in the consumer marketplace
I think that the market can bear all three of these big players – for now. And Amazon is first out of the gate. If they can capture enough early market, they may be the big winner.
I just wish that I could get “credit” for all of the Amazon MP3 purchases I’ve already made. I hate to move all my stuff right back to them – and then have to buy additional storage. It’s not fair! Wah! Wah! Wah!
-Roo

The intersection of vision and action

Tag: Amazon Cloud Drive