Thursday, January 29, 2009

Reacting to competitors

One of the things that frustrates me is when there are two competing services that are striving for every ounce of customer real estate they can get their hands on who think they operate in a vacuum.

A good example:  There are MANY online backup services out there.  There is Mozy.com, carbonite.com, Xdrive.com, etc..  When I first heard about Carbonite, I thought it would be great.  So, I signed up for their trial (I almost didn't, which is scary) and tried to backup My Music.  Carbonite couldn't find it, or at least, I couldn't select it.  I did some research and found out that Carbonite does not allow you to backup an external hard drive.  

What?  Really?

So, if I had a 2 TB hard drive that was inside my computer, Carbonite would back it up.  But not if it is a 250GB hard drive that is connected via USB.  Starting to see the flaw in the logic?

So anyway, I checked with Mozy.com and sure enough, they do backup pretty much everything on the whole entire computer, including external hard drives.  They got my money, and my thanks.  But back to my original point: This was about 6 months ago. Carbonite still does not backup external hard drives.  Which is crazy to me.

On a side note, you should definitely sign up for at least one of these services.  I just spent 6 hours getting all of my mother-in-law's files off of her laptop after Windows crapped out on her.  If she had Mozy, it wouldn't have been an issue.

Point number two in the whole "competitor" game:  Why does Google continue to only offer 2 GB of storage for Picasa Web Albums?  Windows Live offers 25 GB now.  Flickr is unlimited storage.  Why are they so slow to respond?  Recently, iPhoto was given a really neat feature, which picks faces out of your photos and automatically tags them so you  know who is in each photo.  Now, Picasa does this, but only online.  I want it locally, because I can't upload all of my photos because I only get 2GB, so I am constantly having to remove pictures from my online album to make room for more.  So, I am paitiently waiting for Picasa/Google to respond with some new features that will please me.

Oh yeah, I am getting all of that for free, so I have a right to complain, right?  Right?

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