Amazon Zocalo
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
Edit: we can also expect Amazon versions of "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply" and "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".
I would guess the time to re-train all 650 on a new platform and the ease of transferring existing files would be more meaningful than the price difference.
after microsft lost that one, apple itself made quicktime (and then itunes) incredible slow and bogus on windows. while previous versions were just fine.
To be fair, the MS Office experience on OS X is about the same: pretty normal with some things slightly off.
Otherwise, everyone would at least try to scam everyone else and would at least try to become a monopoly, since it costs nothing unless you win. And if you do win, the fine won't reach the amount you put in the bank (at least in the case of monopolies, e.g Microsoft).
I suspect Amazon is on their way to running afoul of such laws, or would be if the current business climate wasn't comparatively hostile to the notion of this kind of regulation. I don't think, however, that Zocalo is going to be a piece that attracts much attention; it's going to be the way Amazon seems to increasingly deal with their suppliers in Walmart-esque fashion. (Walmart was notorious for going beyond merely asking for "large customer" discounts and heading into "we will tell you what wholesale price we're going to pay, and you will either make it work or you'll lose the 60-70% of your business we represent.")
This argument might be better applied to what is going on with Hatchet right now.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/business/buy [2] https://aws.amazon.com/zocalo/pricing/
Having used Dropbox for personal stuff, and Box for work stuff, I have to say, neither has completely fit my needs.
Sure, Dropbox is great for working within small groups/teams, and for personal syncing. Sometimes the sharing functionality gets a bit wonky, but definitely the best implementation by far.
Box works decently well in the work environment, but it is definitely clunkier than Dropbox in a lot of respects. No one liked using Box where I worked (FB).
On my own, I've found that the most of my clients don't use any of these. In fact, they still try to run things on FTP sites! As a result, I've had to adapt to them and use Citrix ShareFile. It actually serves a different purpose than Dropbox or Box. It's a drop-in replacement for sending/receiving files to people within and outside your organization. I can silo off folders to specific users, companies, etc. I can send a link to folks asking them to upload files to me. It's definitely fit the bill in a lot of respects.
So internally, I still use Dropbox. But I don't expose that externally to my clients.
It seems that Amazon Zocalo is trying to compete with Google Drive, by allowing you to edit files in the browser, and integrate with your existing IT infrastructure. Not a bad tactic, but I think the service that will do really well in enterprise is one that merges the functionality of ShareFile into Dropbox, with IT integration.
EMC Syncplicity is targeting that usecase (no idea how well it works, yet).
My guess is that the 'different versions' is just that, if you save a new version then they save that away, not that you get to edit online.
No dice. After emailing with 6 different Box employees (all ignoring my requests and trying to sell me on shit I didn't ask for, then would just pass me onto someone else) I was finally told that I could only do that if I paid for an enterprise "call for pricing" license.
Sigh. I'm using a http-auth secured index-of directory for now. If anyone has a superior suggestion, I'm all ears.
I'm a co-founder.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def?ie=UTF8&*Ve...
It does Desktop folder syncing just like dropbox.
I wonder how this new AWS service is going to interact with Amazon Cloud Drive as they seem to be similar products but one is aimed at Consumers and the other is aimed at the Enterprise.
Box can work well enough if you've got everyone on it and you're using it as your main file server. The problem is that if you want to use it with users who expect it to work like Dropbox, it's not really designed for that kind of nimble access.
The pricing is totally inline with the competitors on a per-seat basis. It's even cheaper if you have any of the think client instances.
Interesting to see how it plays out -- and what impact this will have on Box, now that it is delaying its IPO.
Ah well, probably the kind of people who make "enterprise" buying decisions will not even SEE Zocalo on their perception radar, so it will never happen.
These may seem like little changes to one product but they're making it a rock solid product in one vertical that is slowly creeping out into others.
- For pictures: There is no way to see the full resolution without clicking the download link. Fine for photos, no good for the screenshots I like to upload.
- For PDFs: uses pdf.js. That would be nice if I were still using Adobe Reader, not so much in Safari where I have a superior reader built in.
Care to name some of the competitors?
Besides Google Drive, I mean, which I won't use (tried it, and it was crap compared to Amazon, but am trying to avoid Google in general, and I don't want to encourage their bundling of Google Apps with the Drive).
If you have the time installing the open-source, self hosted owncloud probably would be cheaper.
What DropBox needs/should/could figure out is a way to sell subscriptions at $10 to those who are comfortable for paying $10 (which seems to me is completely unlikely, when you get competitors, cost tends to go down)
It is hard to say how they compare on functionality (e.g. versioning, auditing, integration (e.g. Kerberos, AD, etc)). The Amazon web-site is very light on details. It isn't even clear if Amazon has some kind of desktop sync application which is DropBox's bread and butter.
I'd need to wait for a LOT more information on Amazon's offering before jumping ship. Things like versioning (rollbacks, etc) are non-negotiable for many business users and while Amazon's offering might have that the web-site could do a better job letting us know as much.
"You can install the Zocalo client application on your desktop and laptop computers running Windows 7 or MacOS (version 10.7 or later) and designate a folder for syncing. Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices. You can also access Zocalo from your iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets."
This post has some more details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/zocalo-doc-storage-sharing/
Or, probably more relevantly, exactly the same price as the limited-storage tier of Google Apps for Business when the latter is paid monthly, but with 6+ times as much storage, and half the price (again, using monthly rather than annual pricing) of the Google Apps for Business unlimited storage + Vault offering.
Google Apps does, however, offer slightly lower prices with annual commitment, and I don't see anything in the Amazon Zocalo description that makes it clear that it has any compelling features that Google Apps doesn't (it seems like its just a competitor to Drive with enterprise admin tools of the type Google also seems to have in its Google Apps for Business offering, at least at the higher tier, without any of the other things that come with Google Apps.)
And still startups flock to AWS like it's mana from heaven.
I'm intrigued by Rackspace's new OnMetal service, but at any reasonably large scale it's usually a big win to own the hardware (as long as you can afford redundancy).
Also, not sure I understand the "Amazon Prime Video undercuts Netflix" argument. $7.50/mo for Prime vs. $9/mo for Netflix Streaming is pretty much the same ballpark, and you have to pay for Prime up front. I have both (gotta get my free shipping), and I find myself using Prime Video only for the HBO shows.
Remember when you only went to Amazon to buy books?
Also it looks like Box and Google Drive are significantly cheaper.
If you're familiar/know the place, it makes sense why they named it that.
Though I guess not as terrible as SOPA (stick you beat someone with), or PIPA (he is touching me in inappropriate places).
And CISA which sounds like cyst in all languages.
Must make Babylon5 reference: http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo
Or you can reference the real origin of the word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo
It doesn't really look like this Amazon product fits the word being used.
Socket is assumed if no context.
I have never heard of it used as 'tile'. A tile is 'baldoza'.
> # What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.)
> Google might finally unleash GDrive and steal a lot of Dropbox's thunder
> (especially if this takes place before launch.) In general, the online
> storage space is extremely noisy, so being marginally better isn't good
> enough; there has to be a leap in value worthy of writing/blogging/telling
> friends about...[1]
That is one of the things that makes tech interesting, you can win really, really big in one area then roll it into other related areas.
this part mentions encryption but is isn't clear:
"All documents are stored in a designated AWS Region and transmitted in encrypted form."
They may offer it as a "checkbox" (I'd say unlikely).
But certainly it would never be 100% client-side encrypted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbjMrQtoZlU
That would be one hell of an easter egg.
Certainly tells something about customer service at Amazon.
"The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure."
But, as far as I know, they don't use Azure/Amazon for any non-storage functionality.
I dumped iTunes for Amazon's music store - works really well on iPad, Android phones, and my laptop. Apple lost me when my curated iTunes library was not available on my droid. Really like the Amazon player clients.
Zocalo looks good for one account for pictures and videos shared by my extended family with permissions, and still keep my work stuff separate.
Where Dropbox really wins though: smooth integration with so many other services. I can, for example, edit my leanpub manuscripts on my laptop, surprisingly well also on my iPad, and actually OK on my droid phone. Same for many other apps that use the Dropbox APIs.
What will probably keep me on Dropbox forever is that $100/year seems really inexpensive for a service that I use a lot, and it would take too much of my time to switch.
Yeah, that drag & drop can sure be a pain in the ass... :)
Been investigating storage VPS solutions for doing so, but I wonder if this would be a more elegant solution.
I don't understand how that is never mentioned when talking about collaborating on documents.
Comments are worthless without track changes.
Someone make word obsolete by making track changes better.
That, or use something like markdown + version control.
That is, can I manipulate the back end via s3 and s3 tools ?
I think it's the little plastic you put into a hole in the wall after you drill it. It's so the screw you place in the wall is securely set and won't move. Cool name!
Antonio López de Santa Anna was the president (eleven noncontiguous terms) of recently independent Mexico in the early 1800s and wanted to build a monument to the Revolution that started in 1811 and secured that independence. He had the government put up a plinth for that monument in the central plaza where the National Cathedral and Presidential Palace sat, but it was never finished. Santa Anna was too busy losing Texas to the slave power; the Anglo Texans rebelled because Mexico had abolished slavery and they wanted some.
Now Mexican towns almost always have a central square with the local church on one side and the ayuntamiento (city hall) on the other. It usually has elaborate band stands, gardens, benches, and flagstone walking paths.
The central plaza in the capital of the Mexican Republic, officially the Plaza of the Constitution, came to be called by metonymy the Zócalo. The plinth itself was taken down in the 1850s, but the name stuck. In fact, the name spread through the country and now all the central plazas in the republic are called zócalos.
The thing that makes it attractive to me is that it can sync with a Netgear NAS. About half our staff are in a central office, the other half are remote, so this is a solution that looks like it would cater well to that situation.
Looks like this market will commoditized and be yet another race to bottom.
I don't understand what is so "awful" about it?
Should it be a vowel-less contraction with an .io domain name to be cool (bxr.io ?)
Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Simple Storage Service (S3) Elastic Block Store (EBS) Relational Database Service (RDS) Amazon WorkSpaces.
And then there is Zocalo.
Sure, Elastic Beanstalk is less "enterprise professional" compared to the others, but the name is incredibly descriptive, they are comparing the service to a magical beanstalk that grows and grows, like with the service, your app will autoscale.
Zocalo doesn't have the "enterprise professional" sound of the major services, nor the descriptive nature of the more fun named services. So while it may not be _awful_, I have no qualms in saying it is not good.
It really is. No matter how much you thought about it, how many nights of brainstorming with your pillow smelling like señoritas, or perhaps drinking margaritas at a pub in the zocalo. It is stupid.
Please say this is a 'beta' and it will be renamed to Amazon cloud, drive, square, plaza, or whatever but drop it, just drop it.
It's where everything is, and where you go when you need to get something.
I think it's a great name.
It sucks, but whatev.
This is competing with Box and with clunkier solutions from EMC. It's also competing against SharePoint Online.
I really like Dropbox, an state of art product and I'm also a great fan of Bezos company and his strategies, but I currently feel very satisfied with Dropbox, everything works very well.
so far they only tied the accounts with cloud services, where the audience is clever enough to not use their home amazon accounts at. and instead create one with their employer email.
now with this office suit, everyone will just login with their home account. just like they do with corporate google docs. well, google is a bad example because then they made everything worse by joining personal and domain (which often meant employee at small company) into a single account.