Honestly surprised that AWS, GCP, or Azure haven't acquired BackBlaze by now. Seems like an obvious move.
> surprised that AWS, GCP, or Azure haven't acquired Backblaze by now
Sometimes press/customers/people ask us how many customers has Backblaze "converted over from" S3 to B2. To be honest, I think the answer is approximately zero. If a customer already has a Petabyte uploaded into S3, it is simply not practical or cost effective to download that from S3 and import it into B2. The S3 download costs are extremely expensive (9 cents per GByte to download out of S3, vs 1 cent per GByte to download out of B2).
Most of Backblaze's B2 customers fall into one of two camps:
1) New customers starting out that have just started to look at cloud storage and need to decide where to put their data. They look at S3, compare with B2, and make a decision and Backblaze B2 gets some of those customers. Realistically we don't even get half of these new customers either because B2 is missing a feature the potential customer needs, or because the customer has not even heard of Backblaze. So Backblaze is probably not causing Amazon too much lost revenue yet.
2) Multi-cloud customers. Any one "cloud provider" can have outages, including Backblaze and including Amazon. So if you store an entire copy of your data in Amazon S3, and also store an entire copy in Backblaze B2, you will (by definition) have both more durable data and higher availability data than a single copy in either one alone. By definition this doesn't actually cost Amazon S3 any sales, because you STILL need a complete copy in S3!! For multi-cloud, Backblaze B2 doesn't harm Amazon one bit.
> Seems like an obvious move (for Amazon to acquire Backblaze).
Amazon has never offered to buy Backblaze, but also we are not for sale. Or at very least not at the prices Amazon would probably want to spend (or could justify to their board). I don't know if this is common knowledge but Backblaze is employee owned. We never took any significant VC funding, so the only people with voting rights on the board of directors are the original 5 Backblaze founders (including myself). We like what we are doing and we COMPLETELY control our own destiny and work environment. Literally nobody (except customers) can tell us what to do, how to price our products, or what features to build. Backblaze is a fun company to work at, and we all make a good living. So it would be inordinately expensive to buy us out just to put us out of business and dissolve our tight-knit group here and ruin all our fun. Our plan is to stay independent forever.
This as much as anything encourages me to trust and invest in Backblaze. Long may you live. Maybe I'll get around to writing that Rust SDK I've been meaning to write for a while...
If you think harder, the closest service is google drive that already provides tens of GB for free to million of consumers. It's very different to backblaze, yet close enough in some regards. By some metrics, BackBlaze is a joke while google is backing up billions of android phones already and other stuff.
> Backblaze is a low cost service for cheap customers. AWS and GCP are "enterprise" services.
I agree. This is accurate. Backblaze is a reasonable choice for customers who want to pay less. Plus "enterprise" means the vendor sucks up to the customer and makes them feel important, visits the customer in person, stuff like that. Backblaze saves money by skipping the on-site visits, and we pass on the savings to the customer.
Backblaze is more of a self serve product. Customers can just sign up in the middle of the night, pay by credit card, and use the service for 1/4th the cost of an "enterprise" experience.
> Backblaze is a joke while Google is backing up billions of android phones already and other stuff
It is true that Backblaze is not as large as Google or Amazon yet. Customers that sign up with Backblaze must be comfortable that. I'm biased, but I would suggest there are advantages of storing your data in both locations: both Amazon S3 and also in Backblaze B2. One advantage is that if Amazon S3 has an outage, you can still retrieve that data during the S3 outage from Backblaze B2. Also, data stored in both Amazon S3 and also Backblaze B2 is more durable than data stored in either location alone.
In the end, is it Ok for some customers to have an alternative choice to use Backblaze?
Carbonite is also a good choice for some people with certain needs.
And if you aren't using anything else, Backblaze Personal Backup is also a fine choice for some customers! Backblaze has a feature called "Business Groups" that is focused around allowing IT people to pay for all their employee's backups in a central location, and even manage backups in an organization. To be clear: "Business Groups" is a free feature, so whether you are a company or an individual our online backup is the exact same cost. Customers are not forbidden (or discouraged) from using Backblaze Personal Backup in a corporate setting.
Choice is a good thing for customers. Competition is a good thing for customers.