Amazon launches Zocalo. A competitor to Dropbox & Google Drive

Ephraim Batambuze III September 1, 2014

Less than a minute

Today, e-commerce giant Amazon.com, released its file-sharing service, Zocalo.

It’s a full-featured piece of cloud software that could shake up Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. Perhaps more important, the service could boost adoption of the cloud-computing infrastructure underlying Zocalo.

The e-commerce giant is tempting people with 200GB per user for as many as 50 users in a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $5 per user per month for that amount of storage. Prices go up based on companies’ storage needs.

However Google Drive for Work service provides unlimited storage to businesses for $10 per user per month.

Amazon first announced Zocalo last month. The news got people in the cloud world talking once again about Amazon’s habit of taking bites out of its own ecosystem, as Amazon cloud customer Dropbox partly depends on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

Google and Microsoft have shown their commitment to cutting cloud infrastructure prices and effectively stay competitive with Amazon in that market.

But Amazon has for many years demonstrated its capability to rapidly cut the prices of many of its cloud services. That practice should apply to Zocalom, too, which is why younger companies, like Dropbox and Box, ought to consider themselves warned.