Amazon Drive is shutting down on December 31, 2023

I think the market can only handle so many "Drive" providers, but I am surprised that Amazon is tossing in the towel. Honestly, I didn't even known that Amazon Drive was a thing, so maybe that was part of the problem... poor marketing?

coolfactor said:

I think the market can only handle so many "Drive" providers, but I am surprised that Amazon is tossing in the towel. Honestly, I didn't even known that Amazon Drive was a thing, so maybe that was part of the problem... poor marketing?

I was going to say the same, I think they didn't market it very well. Review sites of cloud storage don't mention it often, if at all. I found it randomly trying to find a cloud storage provider that behaved more like a cloud hard drive than a synced drive. A lot of cloud drives like OneDrive and DropBox keep files both locally and in the cloud and getting them to behave as online-only isn't all that intuitive. Amazon Drive allows just dropping files into the space without syncing.

I'm surprised they are dropping it given how big they are in cloud services but I could see how not many people would have found it to see the benefit of using it as an online-only drive. It's probably very hard to market to this target audience effectively when so many people are familiar with DropBox and OneDrive that are often bundled with or supported by other services.

Some alternatives to Amazon Drive that behave like a hard drive in the cloud are pCloud and IceDrive. They have lifetime payment options and end-to-end encryption features:

https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html?period=lifetime
https://icedrive.net/plans

They work like an external USB drive and files can be dropped into it and unmounted.

Maybe Amazon could have marketed Amazon Drive to their Prime members with a 12 month free trial and shown users how to upload a file and how to share it with family. I think the general public is also still not clued up about system backups. They could have used this as an alternative to BackBlaze but it needs good software on the client side that integrates with the OS.

Given the marketing effort needed while also trying to cut prices to compete, it's hard to make cloud storage profitable. DropBox has made losses for years:

2015: -$325m, 2016: -$210m, 2017: -$111m, 2018: -$484m, 2019: $-52m, 2020: -$256m, 2021: $335m

They only made profit last year out of the past 7 years. They have 16 million users now. It seems like a big money pit until you get a high volume of users and the hardware investment starts to pay off.

Handling the hardware side must be difficult, having to store essentially 16 million hard drives of content in multiple data centers and keep redundancy as well as the bandwidth for high data transfers in and out.

Given that a big company like Amazon can shut down their services, it's best to use multiple cloud providers to allow for shutdowns happening without losing the backups. OneDrive, DropBox, Mega, Google Drive are probably good long-term bets for not shutting down the service but it would be nice if they offered services like pCloud/IceDrive.

Amazon Prime members get unlimited photo storage as part of their Prime membership. This probably serves the primary cloud storage needs for a lot of Amazon’s customers. I use the Prime-linked photo storage to allow me to cycle through a snapshot subset of my personal photos on all of my Echo devices that have displays, i.e., like rotating wallpaper. Amazon Photos users can designate a local folder to sync with the Amazon Photos cloud storage or they can simply copy photos they want to have available to access via the Amazon Photos service on devices including Mac, iOS/iPadOS, and Echo, which is what I do. It’s a nicety since I cannot directly link (and would not want to link) my Apple Photos to my Amazon account.

In my opinion there is often a line of demarcation between “nicety” and “necessity” that forms around some of these emerging technologies, including cloud storage. The companies that are involved with these technologies always want to transition their customers from nicety to necessity. They will often give away the nicety version in hopes of transitioning their customers over to necessity.

The mechanisms for encouraging the transition can vary widely, but one of the key ways is to limit the capacity or performance of the “free” version. Other ways include optimizing the cloud based version to overcome inherent limitations of the local machine. Apple does this by allowing cloud based content to be selectively downloaded to the local machine only as needed so as not to overwhelm the limited capacity of the local machine. Once your cloud storage or service capacity exceeds your local storage or service capacity the cloud based service becomes a necessity, i.e., a recurring subscription cost, which is ultimately the endgame for every cloud service provider.

Amazon obviously didn’t get enough of their customers transitioned to making Amazon Drive a necessity in their computing lives. Instead of becoming a necessity it simply became redundant. It’s actually somewhat ironic because Amazon probably has the technical infrastructure, capacity, and expertise in place to serve this particular need better than just about any company out there.