Quote from: brandoff on October 28, 2014, 06:30:14 PM

Quote from: LiteBit on October 28, 2014, 05:39:50 PM

How does Microsoft's latest announcement effect Storj's DriveShare business and, in turn, the value of SJCX?
[Suspicious link removed]j.com/personal-technology/2014/10/27/microsoft-gives-office-365-subscribers-unlimited-cloud-storage/

The link is an article on Microsoft's announcement to offer FREE cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers. This essential moves cloud storage's price point to $6.95/month for UNLIMITED storage. (or whatever Office 365 is per month).

Well, among other things, you need to be signed up with Microsoft for Office 365 and Microsoft will have your payment and personal information stored in some fashion that you don't have control over. If your storage space is encrypted, it's likely that MS holds the decryption keys so your privacy is questionable (though I haven't researched their offering in depth). You also have to keep paying Microsoft (i.e. the same singular entity) indefinitely or your space is gone. If you end up storing lots of data with Microsoft (assuming you could, in actuality, store hundreds of terabytes -- e.g. if you're a video producer), Microsoft could suddenly decide to scrap its unlimited storage model, or spin off the business to someone else. It could also decide to suddenly change its pricing structure: i.e. you still have unlimited storage, but now they decide to charge an additional $25/month if you hold over 10 TB on their service.

With Storj, you'd only pay to store the amount of space you're using at the redundancy you desire. Your files are chunked, encrypted and distributed across the network so there isn't a single point of failure. There isn't one central company that can shut off your space all at once, as well. Think MEGA -- when they got shut down, a lot of legitimate users lost access to their backups/files. If someone stores something funky on a centralized service, an enforcement agency may decide to freeze the entire infrastructure or server during an investigation/to preserve evidence (that other innocent folks data may be held on) and you may be out of luck with access.

I'm also skeptical of indefinite, unlimited storage with a traditional provider. When iPhones first came out, many cellular providers like AT&T offered unlimited data plans, but those are now gone unless you're grandfathered in. And only a few days ago, Bitcasa, which also had an unlimited storage offering for $10/month, also stopped (see: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/24/bitcasa-no-unlimited/).

Disclosure: am Storj dev.

Does this change any pricing structure for the Storj end user (the folks paying to store stuff)?

I agree, "unlimited" plans always come with an "*" asterisk...