Rant: Why Amazon Web Services Shouldn't Take on Google Drive and Dropbox, Maybe?

"Scratch everything we warned you about Dropbox, its security issues and ""throwing the baby out with the bath water"", and forget Google drive for that matter, or at least that's what Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced.

Amazon Web Services Annouces Zocalo

Yes, the cloud providing juggernaut, that we're not quite sure what it wants to be, is it a retailer, a literal drone-using ""Dropbox"" of its own, what happened to the days when we bought books from Amazon?

Sure we're not doubting that Amazon and its retail-side is second to none, last year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday / Santa Shaming pictures from their factory floor were nothing short of amazing, and let's not forget, Amazon's public cloud is, well, it's pretty great.

Here's where we're having a bit of an issue with Amazon: maybe these file-sharing waters might be best left uncharted, AWS, and here's why (by the way Amazon's ""Dropbox"" is called Zocalo (which comes from Spanish / Italian roots meaning basically a plinth or pedestal) - but that doesn't really matter):

1) Dropbox is free. Google Drive is free. Zocalo is not free. Zocalo is temptingly and a bit confusingly cheap, though, we'll give you that: ""200GB per user for as many as 50 users in a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $5 per user per month for that amount of storage."" According to the company's blog. If we're doing our math right, and we seldom are (we are writers) that's $250 per month for 200GB, and that's not free. Dropbox and Google Drive are free.

2) AWS is just being a bully. Who uses AWS? Dropbox does. One of AWS' biggest cloud customers is now one of its competitors? This is nothing new to Amazon, slowly taking little bites out of its clients who make up its make infrastructure, and once that client has been gobbled up, well they can't exactly say they weren't warned, now can they?

3) The Silver Lining: Take a look at Zocalo. It's nothing new. It resembles the circles of Google, and it does everything that Dropboxdoes, only for a fee. Now imagine this: if the ultimate hybrid cloud of AWS remained the ultimate hybrid cloud of AWS -they'd leave out Zocalo and offer Dropbox as part of their product, or they're going to start looking at lot like another company, and that's Google, and at least Google doesn't have drones.

So, check it out, try the ""pinnacle"" of file sharing, we'll wait, we hope you come back to Dropbox, and that's the Friday Afternoon Rant."