Highlights:
- Rakuten Drive offers free 10GB storage and unlimited file transfers, unlike competitors.
- Integrates with Microsoft 365 for document viewing and editing.
- Targets both individuals and businesses with separate plans.
- Paid “PRO” version increases storage to 1TB, allows bigger file uploads, and extends transfer link expiration.
- Future integration with Rakuten’s loyalty program planned.
I have literally never heard of this company before and it sounds like particularly unsubtle Indian scammers
They took over a UK company called Play.com that was big in the 2010s for cheap CD purchases.
Headline:
One of Japan’s largest tech companies just launched its own cloud storage service
Oh, boy! As an American consumer, I’m even more perplexed what the hell they are.
Like 15 years ago, Rakuten seemed to be a normal ecommerce site. I think they bought buy.com or something to get a foothold in the US market. Then they pivoted to being some sort of cashback referral service.
I’m not really sure why that would lead customers to think “yeah, I want cloud storage from the people who made a weird janky digital simulation of the Piggly Wiggly Value Club Card!”
(AWS made it work because they could say “we have the infrastructure to host one of the busiest sites on earth, it’s good enough for you”, but Rakuten does not have that credibility in the US)
They do a lot of things, mostly related to online retailing in Japan. They bought Ebates, presumably to get all the shopping data they collect, it wasn’t really a pivot. (Also they’d been doing financial-ish stuff like rewards programs before apparently. I went and read their Wikipedia article when I saw this post.)
They also bought Kobo, a Kindle competitor that I actually like. (Partially because you can still easily remove their DRM).
Is it 10 Gigabyte or Terabyte?
SaaSS (service as a software substitute) bullshit
It is common for SaaSS dis-services to charge a monthly fee for use. Usually one SaaSS site does not substitute for another, so if users become unhappy with one dis-service provider it is no easy matter to switch to another. When users become dependent on one, it can gouge them at will with repeated small price increases that over time add up to a lot. We view the loss of freedom inherent in SaaSS as worse than the cost in money, but when a dis-service has you over a barrel, the cost can be painful. Thus, even users who don’t see deeper than the bottom line should beware of SaaSS.
Businesses should host their own servers.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html
Nobody’s saying to host it on-premises. The SaaSS article is advocating running software that you control on servers that you control. That’s it. The server is likely in a datacenter, and its hardware could be owned by the datacenter, the customer, or someone else. It could be a virtualized host.
The SaaSS article is about software and services, not hardware.
