More discounting:
Dropbox Bulks Up Its ‘Pro’ Cloud-Storage Plan By Brian R. Fitzgerald
Wall Street Journal
9:08 am ET, Aug 27, 2014
Dropbox is reloading for the cloud-storage war with a simple plan: a terabyte of space for $9.99 a month.
The new “Pro” plan, announced Wednesday on Dropbox’s website, drastically raises the ceiling on space — a tenfold increase — at the lowest price that was on the company’s previous menu. Previously, Dropbox sold 100 gigabytes for $9.99 a month and as much as 500 GB for $50 a month, as well as other subscription options under a plan called “Dropbox for Business.”
It also positions Dropbox more competitively against an array of competitors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft MSFT and Box, which are aggressively targeting heavy-duty and business customers. In April, Microsoft announced a 40-fold increase in online storage available for its Office 365 and OneDrive business customers. That move came after Google in March slashed prices on its Drive cloud storage. Amazon has been regularly slashing prices, too.
Big and diverse businesses like Google and Microsoft can eat the costs of giving away storage at little cost to power users, but that’s a tougher road for newer companies like Dropbox and Box. Box’s outspoken chief executive, Aaron Levie, said in a tweet earlier this year that cloud storage eventually will be “free and infinite.” That would make design and features the differentiating characteristics for the companies. On that front, Levie has criticized his bigger rivals like Microsoft for building closed services that make it difficult to move data between products.
As part of its new plan, Dropbox is adding new features to its suite of “pro” service, including additional security measures and new permissions around sharing data.
blogs.wsj.com |
