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March 16, 2006
The new world of online storage
You might have noticed that our posts haven't had quite the same frequency over the past week or so. The reason is we've been working on a 2000-word magazine feature on Web 2.0, which involved a lot of research.
What we found particularly interesting is how few Australian projects there are in the directory of Web 2.0 services. That might increase, perhaps, if more people learn how to use Ajax.
The other thing we started thinking about is the way Web 2.0 tools like Ruby on Rails are altering the competitive landscape in the area of Web hosting.
The current theory is that web hosting has become a commodity business. Smartyhost doesn't think so, and given that they're charging $144 for 150MB of storage, plus 20GB a month of bandwidth, maybe they're right.
But Nik Cubrilovic, who is currently in Silicon Valley on a mission that's presumably associated with the public beta of Omnidrive has done some more exhaustive research on the economics of online storage. His point is that the cost is in the bandwidth, and given that he proposes that we all start using Web servers as our primary storage, he's going to be hoping that he's got the numbers right.
Nik's betting that Omnidrive will succeed because "users will have benefits outside of just copying files to a webserver (simple desktop access, offline access, rich media publishing, encrypted storage, sharing and multiple interfaces from multiple platforms".
We suspect he's right. The thing is that he's going to have some pretty stiff competition from the likes of Site5, which adds Flashback to the mix. Its ability to provide an instant roll-back could be compelling for a lot of customers. The fascinating thing about Flashback is that its architect, David Felstead, is Melbourne based. He got the job with Site 5 largely because they were using the Dashboard widget he developed to handle Ruby documentation.
Another Melbourne programmer, Justin French, works for a competitor, Joyent which recently took over TextDrive, which 37Signals uses. (By the way, we still admire 37Signals, even though we couldn't resolve our differences over their e-book).
Joyent's variation on the theme involves bundling its email, calendars, contacts, and shared applications into the hosting mix.
We'd be interested in your thoughts on online storage, which we think will become increasingly valuable to most users.
UPDATE: And what about box.net? It adds mobile support, and promises a slew of other new features. Russell Beattie cals it "awesome". They don't see themselves as competing against other hosting services. They think they're competing against Google! This is not an area we'd like to be invested in, but for the user, it's great news.
Posted by cw at March 16, 2006 06:02 PM