Assuming that storage costs are halving every 18 months, I would assume that charging $N/mo for backup (amortized over a lifetime of say, 4 years) would be a really reasonable business model.
As they say, there's always going to be outliers, all you need to do is cover the average cost of backup for the average user. This seems easy to me, and very easy to plan & estimate what your costs are.
Demand isn't static.
Your costs decrease by the storage equivalent of Moore's Law, but your customers demands increase by roughly the same amount.
In short -- The first digital camera I used had a floppy disk that fit about 20 photos. (Maybe 75KB). My camera now takes 7.5MB Photos (higher if I shoot in raw) and rather than taking 20-40 in a session -- I'll take 100. The first computer I connected to the internet had a 4GB Hard Drive. I currently have around 3.9TB of storage connected to the internet.
This isn't a gmail play. Barring celebrity status -- you can only recieve so many emails... (Dunbars number and all that). As my storage costs decrease I use more storage and need more backups. They mention that these roughly balance out. The problem they have is that costs like electricity/cooling/staffing are not likely to be going down any time soon.
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Assuming that storage costs are halving every 18 months, I would assume that charging $N/mo for backup (amortized over a lifetime of say, 4 years) would be a really reasonable business model.
As they say, there's always going to be outliers, all you need to do is cover the average cost of backup for the average user. This seems easy to me, and very easy to plan & estimate what your costs are.
Demand isn't static. Your costs decrease by the storage equivalent of Moore's Law, but your customers demands increase by roughly the same amount.
In short -- The first digital camera I used had a floppy disk that fit about 20 photos. (Maybe 75KB). My camera now takes 7.5MB Photos (higher if I shoot in raw) and rather than taking 20-40 in a session -- I'll take 100. The first computer I connected to the internet had a 4GB Hard Drive. I currently have around 3.9TB of storage connected to the internet.
This isn't a gmail play. Barring celebrity status -- you can only recieve so many emails... (Dunbars number and all that). As my storage costs decrease I use more storage and need more backups. They mention that these roughly balance out. The problem they have is that costs like electricity/cooling/staffing are not likely to be going down any time soon.