We saw the announcement today that Box will now be offering 50GB – yes, you heard me, 50GB – FREE. Yikes.
Frank has talked about this before, but, what a great deal for Free users! But, being a cloud service, with a business model of selling storage – Box has to, you know, deploy and maintain the storage. So, who’s paying for all this “free” storage?
Well, I don’t know for sure, but I guess it’s the paying customers. It makes sense. Box has to make money, and they have to cover their operating expenses (see: free storage), so SOMEone other than Box has to pay for it.
So Free users – hooray for you, what a great deal. And watch this race to the bottom as Dropbox, Google et al have to chase this – even greater bargains for Free users. BUT, if you are an enterprise that needs to get control back of your sensitive company data, why do you want to subsidize all these free users?
Bring file sync and share back in house, under your control, using the storage you want (hmm, maybe even some of this free storage I hear companies are offering) and stop subsidizing the Free users.
