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Mozy's PR disaster: the curse of the all-you-can-eat service
- TAGS:business model, Cloud, cloud computing, Decho, enterprise, Insider Content, Mozy, MozyHome, SaaS
- IT TOPICS:Cloud Computing, Data Center, Desktop Apps, Enterprise Apps, Internet, Management, Servers, Storage
EMC's Mozy forces huge fee hikes for some users of its "unlimited" cloud backup product. Users are up in arms, thanks to piss-poor PR planning.
By Richi Jennings. February 2, 2011.
All you can eat! It's an attractive business model, whether you're an Internet service or an ethnic restaurant. But if you're providing an "unlimited" service, what do you do if it's costing you too much to provide? What if, like EMC's Mozy, people are  using it more than you'd expected? I have some ideas, in The Long View...
(EMC)
Power users "abusing" an unlimited service is the perennial curse of the all-you-can-eat business model. If you handle it badly, you can easily create a PR disaster for yourself. The latest victim of the curse is EMC-owned Mozy, arguably the market leading online backup provider.
The classic Mozy service offering was an unlimited plan, which sold for $5 per user per month. The EMC division has unceremoniously killed that plan, replacing it with one that offers tiers of storage, but costs significantly more.
Read on to find out what went wrong, and what Mozy could have done differently...
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