Amazon Pushes Cloud Product for Consumers

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Not to be outdone by other consumer tech companies that offer free online storage, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) now offers free cloud-based storage as well. The service is a means for Amazon and rivals to tether customers to their portable devices and computers. In a world in which apps and multimedia products are offered almost universally by companies from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) to Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), the Amazon Cloud Drive is a bare minimum product to engender customer loyalty.

The world’s largest e-commerce company offers a promotion for its base cloud product:

Amazon Cloud Drive is your place for everything digital. Cloud Drive offers free mobile apps, secure access from any computer, and it’s built in to your Amazon devices—so you can access your digital content everywhere you are.

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The main reason many consumers want access to the cloud is to store files that might take up too much “room” on their portable devices. Amazon has decided to be agnostic about which operating systems it supports:

Get the free mobile app for iOS and Android to access all of your photos and videos, back up your photos on-the-go, and keep your photos safe, even if your device is lost, damaged, or upgraded. If you have a Fire phone, Cloud Drive is already built in.

The Fire smartphone is Amazon’s attempt to take market share from Apple and Samsung, which together dominate global industry market share. Cloud Drive favors Fire owners, another attempt to get consumers to prefer its product over ones like the iPhone:

All Amazon customers get 5 GB of free storage, and Fire phone owners get free, unlimited storage for all the photos taken with their Fire phone.

Additional space is available starting at less than $1 per month. Upgrade your plan anytime from your Amazon account settings.

But as free storage becomes a commodity among consumer electronics companies, Amazon probably will find Cloud Drive is not much of an advantage.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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