When Carbonite entered the online backup market in May 2006, everyone
in the online backup business was pricing their services by the
gigabyte. We introduced the first backup service with unlimited storage
for a fixed price. Why? Because our market research showed that people
didn't like having to learn new software applications and they didn't
like having to figure out what they needed to back up. If your backup
is limited to, say, 5GB, you are forced to pick and choose files and
folders. We envisioned a service that didn't require the user to do
anything other than put in an email address and password.
Many people think that we came out with unlimited backup in order to
win the "gigabyte war" vendor A gives you 5GB for $5/mo, vendor B gives
you 10GB for $5/mo, and so on. But that's really not why we decided on
unlimited backup – the REAL reason was simplicity of the user
experience. If you make the capacity unlimited, then the user doesn't
have to make any choice – we just back up everything by default.
What happened, of course, is that our direct competitors were forced to
switch to an unlimited pricing plan, but THEY DIDN'T CHANGE THEIR
PRODUCTS! They missed the point. You still had to learn new software.
Every bit of complexity makes it harder for the user and lowers
adoption rate.
We are committed to one simple task: protect all the valuable data on
your computer with the absolute minimum of effort and at the lowest
possible cost to you.
— Dave
CEO, Carbonite