Files on Ovi now formally open for business

[slitchfield]

Files on Ovi, the commercial hosting and PC access component of Nokia's new services, has just gone live for real, i.e. it's not beta anymore. See this post for details and rates. Comments welcome - will you use it? If not, why not?

Read on in the full article.

[Rafe]

Significantly over priced in my opinion.

[Williamoni]

Yes. I've decided to wait until Rafe spots it's available for one dollar.

[ashu]

well, i see usefulness here but at this price, nah!

I have already missed that $1 quickoffice 5 offer and ended up buying it for $70.

But this thing does not have the same utility for me as that app so i will also wait for rafe's post of its availability for $1 !!!!!

[brendan]

im with the other posters - seems expensive and only mildly useful.

i doubt i would use it if it was free.

i would be really interested to know how many people actually signed up and paid for this service.

doesn't mobileme offer much more than this?

[Rafe]

Especially when there are cheaper and better alternatives available.

[Tzer2]

It's quite fascinating with online services, the pricing is extremely susceptible to market forces. If there's a cheaper alternative it's very easy to switch to it if you want.

If they're free things work a bit differently of course, people tend to stick to whichever free service they started on unless there's some mouthwatering feature to tempt them away.

Either way, it's extremely competitive in terms of price and/or features, and the door is wide open for new startups too.

In companies' favour though, it's also very easy to change your prices, it can be done with literally just a few button presses. If your rivals change their prices you can match them within a few minutes if you want to.

[brendan]

yeh but if you change your prices you can alienate your current subscribers unless you offer refunds or similar and then you still end up with egg on your face.

anyway who likes these services where you 'backup' online? downloading from the net is ok but uploading 10Gb of info is a pain. The idea is ok but in practice its useless.

this files on ovi service is a classic example of nokia's problem these days - to me Nokia would have done better to pay someone to fix bugs in their phones than to develop this service - what do you think?

[Tzer2]

yeh but if you change your prices you can alienate your current subscribers unless you offer refunds or similar and then you still end up with egg on your face.

Well, that's always the risk with price cuts in any business, but all companies cut their prices from time to time.

The main point I was trying to make though is that making a cut (or a price increase for that matter) is physically much easier with a product that's entirely online, there are more options at your disposal.

anyway who likes these services where you 'backup' online? downloading from the net is ok but uploading 10Gb of info is a pain. The idea is ok but in practice its useless.

You wouldn't be uploading 10gb all at once, the 10gb is the maximum limit, like the limit on a webmail service.

I know some people don't like storing stuff online, but personally I think it's definitely the future as long as it's done reliably and securely:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/featu...d_internet.php

this files on ovi service is a classic example of nokia's problem these days - to me Nokia would have done better to pay someone to fix bugs in their phones than to develop this service - what do you think?

They're actually doing pretty well as a company, almost every department is making a good profit and their market share is creeping upwards. That's pretty good compared to Sony Ericsson or Motorola's phone business which are both making losses and losing market share.

There's a lot of work that needs doing on some of Nokia's interfaces, but that's more to do with design decisions rather than money. Also, when you have 40% of the market when your nearest rivals have about 20%, it's very hard to make radical changes to designs in case they cost you your market share.

On bugs, they already do pay people to fix the bugs in their phones, for example the N95's latest firmware is a million miles better than the original firmware.

As for just sticking to what they know, if Nokia had taken that attitude when they were founded they'd still be selling lumber and wood products. They've only survived 140 years by constantly changing what they do and moving on from time to time. After wood they used to make electrical cables, rubber boots and television sets before manufacturing mobile phones, so it makes sense for them to start looking for the next thing to move into after phones.

A lot of services on Ovi will probably fail, but perhaps some of them won't. The only way to find out what works for sure is to try lots of things and see what happens.

[abruenin]

I second all of you, saying that it is too expensive. I already dislike the pricing for mobile me, which is annual € 69,- for 20 GB files, email, calendar, contacts, blog space and photo gallery.
But files on OVI is way too expensive.

My 2 cents: seems to me you can use a combination of cheaper services to get the same thing -- iDrive costs a less ($50/yr for 150GB)... and you can use Orb (free) to access files from a mobile... so you get both online access and online backup, for more data, for less money. Is Ovi giving you something more than that?