Cloud for nothing and your disk for free

A few small conversations have resonated with me lately around public cloud offerings.

The first conversation went like this…
Person: I hate Go_gle Docs sometimes, the formatting is just terrible.
Me: Why don’t you try Office Web Apps as part of Office 365? They do a great job of maintaining document fidelity while presenting you with rich formatting options.
Person: Only when they make it free.
Me: Try Windows Live / Hotmail then, it also includes Office Web Apps but doesn’t cost anything.
Person: (silence)

The second conversation went like this…
Person: I want to share documents with my team, we use Dropbox at the moment because it’s free but it’s not as functional as I want it to be.
Me: Have you heard about SharePoint Online as part of Office 365? It’s great for managing & sharing documents, as well as improving the collaboration between team members and the sharing of data through some amazing out of the box features.
Person: But does it cost anything?
Me: Yes, but only around the same price as a sandwich per person per month.
Person: Not interested, it can’t beat free.

Those aren’t the only two conversations I’ve had like that, and unfortunately it’s a culture we’re starting to live in now – where you can get things for free.
Unfortunately a lot of free service users don’t realise that their provider is generally using one of two models:
Freemium – where a subset of functionality is free but the moment you want any of the good features or more space you will need to pay.
Advertising supported – this doesn’t always mean you’ll see the ads, as your information could simply be mined for trends and patterns which is then sold on to advertising partners and may follow you to other sites.

Something that consumers of services (business or personal) need to realise that if they are not paying for the service then they’re not actually the customer – THEY ARE THE PRODUCT!

In the first of my pieces for Dynamic Business I talk about the differences between paid cloud versus free services.