Giants scramble for cloud storage offering free banner or replay video industry war of attrition

Original title: Giants Scramble for cloud storage offering free banner or replay video industry war of attrition

"I am the heavy user of Dropbox," he said. In the United States, when my family is the most exaggerated when a total of six computers in use, I often in order to find a file in which computer in the end is a headache, Dropbox appearance let me think it is what I want. "Wanghuai," he continued, "But even so, I'm not a paying user." ”

Wanghuai, an early Facebook employee, returned as an angel investor after leaving Facebook in September 2011. He said this passage to reporters in south Dublin, both to prove that the cloud storage services in the personal market really real needs, but also to say that the market embarrassment.

Prior to the installation of the server has burned a lot of money, but individual users pay habits have not developed, coupled with several domestic internet and it giants have sacrificed "free" banner. The competition in the cloud storage field will be like the video industry of that year, become a battle of resource consumption of capital strength, "The remnant is king"?

Inside and outside the slaughter cloud storage

More than a year ago, Dropbox, the US cloud storage company, turned five times-fold in just over half a year, bringing a boom in domestic cloud storage. However, unlike other versions of the "Copytochina" story, in the cloud storage battle on the battlefield, not only have such as the first 115 net disk, cool plate, Yunno, nuts cloud, such as a small entrepreneurial team, but also squeezed into including Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, Jinshan, 360, including a number of internet and it "giants."

In many of the entrepreneurial concept of being hot, why the Giants are only the "cloud" flocking to it?

Pre Angel investor Wang Lijie explained to South reporters, with the popularity of smart phones, tablet computers and other intelligent terminals, the amount of data owned by individual users is growing exponentially, whether from storage security or with the convenience of access, uploading data to the cloud rather than local collections, is a general trend.

In other words, when people are accustomed to using different terminals to fetch data stored in the cloud at anytime, the cloud, which stores a lot of data, is the foundation of the entire mobile internet, and "Who owns the cloud, who can really be called a place on the mobile internet", is a big company that doesn't want to miss the cloud. The root cause of opportunity.

In overseas markets, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have begun to build the foundation of cloud computing years ago. Amazon, for example, used the remainder of its other services to S3 cloud storage services for developers in 2006, because of the flexibility with which users can actually "pay how much" to make startups such as Dropbox able to start with "light assets", Provides file synchronization and sharing services for individual users based on S3. At the same time, Dropbox itself is open, can butt all kinds of more vertical subdivision of the application, thus forming a three-dimensional "cloud" ecology.

However, the domestic market situation is very different. The concept of "cloud" has been introduced into the country since around 2008, but the real start of application and popularization in the market is until the end of 2010, according to a survey by the Peking University Center for Market and Media research. For large companies, the importance of the cloud itself, coupled with missed initial development opportunities, they are more eager to launch a "tall and full" cloud service platform, from infrastructure to end products, even vertical application sweep, while offering a "free" banner to attract individual users, trying to push the entire market fast.

But for startups, it's a double whammy of internal and external overlap. On the one hand, they do not like Dropbox and other overseas peers have "giant shoulders" can tread, must invest a lot of upfront money to buy servers and bandwidth; On the other hand, the "free" boom led by the Giants has cut domestic individual users ' enthusiasm for paying services. Even if the start-up companies have strong financing capabilities to rely on, allow it to invest a lot of money, in the short term to rip the market demand, at least within 35 years will not be able to return the burned money, whether for its subsequent financing or the overall business model has drawn a big question mark.

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