"Dropbox is a feature, not a product."

-Steve Jobs, paraphrased

- - - - -

Let's hope they keep racing to the bottom. To break down the value of each brand to consumers:

Dropbox

$120/year for 1 account, 1TB

No photo improvement or sharing features

No document interface (aside from coming compatibility with Office)

Google Drive

$120/year for 1 account, 1TB

G+ photo sharing and auto-awesome improvements

Good-enough GDocs and best-in-class real-time editing

OneDrive

$100/year for 5 accounts, "unlimited" storage (20k file limit)

No photo improvement or sharing features

Best-in-class Office and good-enough real-time editing

Amazon Cloud Drive

$100/year for 1 account, unlimited photo storage

No photo improvement or sharing features, but good timeline organization (and deduplication?)

No document interface

Bundled with Prime shipping/videos/music/lending library

- - - - -

Of the above, Dropbox offers no real value aside from great functionality. That it "just works" SHOULD be a given, but given that OneDrive is capped at 20,000 files and fails to upload from my desktop, I guess we shouldn't take that for granted.

GDrive works fantastically well and offers great photo enhancement, but the price is the highest of anyone here. Particularly if they're trying to develop G+ into a Facebook competitor, you'd think they would offer more-than-competitive pricing to encourage consumers to keep their photo libraries online and glean information about consumer movement patterns, personal networks, local attractions, and personal brand interests. Why roll out cool auto-awesome features if you're going to price them out of the market?

OneDrive has the second best value behind Amazon Prime... in theory. In practice, OneDrive has a 20,000 file cap and again, the program simply won't upload my files from my desktop. There's no photo enhancement, sharing, or organization. I guess they're relying on Office as the big draw. Which makes sense -- documents are an insignificant burden, allowing for steady revenue with few attached costs. And most people won't understand that their photo libraries weren't safely uploaded to the cloud as they expected.

Amazon's Prime Photos is a GREAT value (and seems to work really well in uploading and organizing my photos), but I'm still unclear on whether Prime deduplicates my uploads or has excellent sharing/privacy controls like you can find on G+. Still, the photos feature makes Prime a must-buy even if the rest of Prime's insane value didn't already do that. The only catch is that Amazon doesn't offer two-factor authentication... which is a big deal, Amazon!

- - - - -

Given that the company with the biggest consumer base can leverage their audience to build out the biggest, baddest infrastructure that subsequently takes advantage of marginal cost economics in the delivery of their own services or in the replacement of corporate IT... the race to the bottom makes perfect sense in the consumer sphere. You want the biggest consumer base to justify short-term expansion (and then finance that expansion in the long term with your locked-in customers).

This is only a race to the bottom if you assume that consumer storage is the end game of clouds. In ten years, the biggest clouds can theoretically provide services that replace most corporate IT... and even most personal computers, as seen in today's thin-client Chromebooks. And if Microsoft lets Google beat Azure in this arena, not only will Google dominate in the field of cloud services, Google's vast infrastructure could leverage economies of scale to deliver Google's search/local/maps/whatever services vastly quicker and cheaper than Microsoft could.

Clouds are the modern-day railroads. It's not a race to the bottom if you're investing to replace individual ox-drawn wagons with your own infrastructure.