In 1975 Sony launched Betamax, a supremely high quality videotape standard. A year later JVC entered the market with VHS. Battle commenced with JVC eventually winning the war about a decade later. Why did the clearly inferior product win? It’s a question that has puzzled many. It certainly wasn’t due to product quality. Unquestionably Beta was a better tape. Marketing? Arguably. Price? That was certainly a factor as VHS was demonstrably cheaper than Beta (largely because it was inferior quality).
But you know what? The fundamental issue was storage. Beta tapes were 60 minutes long and VHS 3 hours. Enough storage space to record whole movies in one go. More storage made them more usable and much better value. And that’s what won the war.
Now, fast forward 30 years and a new, but strikingly similar, battle is about to break out.
It too will be won through a better storage proposition, but more than that, this time the product is superior, not inferior, and the price point will be the most attractive that it could possibly be. Because it’s free!
It’s the battle for supremacy in the online (some call it cloud but that’s actually something of a misnomer) storage market. This time the inferior product is already well established. It’s called Dropbox, but there are other contenders too; Sugarsync, iCloud, Box and SkyDrive. Google Drive is about to replace Google Docs, but it too has its Achiles heels.
LifeStuff by contrast only has killer heels.
You see, the fundamental problem with all these Betamax look-a-likes is that they are not cloud storage products at all. They are merely remote storage housed on massive server farms the length and breadth of America, guzzling up Carbon fuelled energy, and harming the envirnoment.
And guess what? That costs. That costs big style.
Sure, you can have a free sample, a couple of gigs of free storage, but that’s just to give you an appetite for it. Thereafter, as you get to rely on it and you have fork out your hard earned cash to add more gigs or be selective about what you store in the useless few gigs you get for free.
LifeStuff doesn’t use a server farm, it really does exist in the cloud. No servers, no storage costs and no harm to the environment.
Because it has no storage cost we can offer it for free, with as much storage as you like. Unlimited in fact. It’s a shared network so the more space you share the more space we give you access to. And check this out. You can use it anywhere with an internet connection, instantaneously, and it’s completely and utterly secure. In fact it’s the most secure network ever created. Try saying that about DropBox, iCloud, SkyDrive and Google Drive and people will think you’ve lost your senses.
Written by Mark Gorman
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