So today Amazon announced its Amazon Cloud Drive service. Unfortunately, at least as far as I can tell, the services is misnamed and way too expensive.

When I hear the term “drive” in this context, that says to me it’s something that my computer OS can mount and display to me as a network attached storage or local hard drive. As far as I can tell this does not seem to be the case. You can only upload and download files to and from the Amazon Cloud Drive via the web interface.

They give you 5Gb of storage for free as an enticement to sign up. Even though I have at least two bigger USB sticks in my backpack right now, I still have to say that’s generous considering that the storage is backed by Amazon’s enterprise-grade S3 storage service.

But Amazon S3 has always seemed to me to be too expensive for casual home use. It’s only worth the money if the things you are storing are really critical assets that you need very high reliability for. Likewise, the paid plans at Amazon Cloud Drive seem too expensive for casual home use. The pricing tiers are structured so that you basically pay $1/Gb/year.

I don’t want to discount the infrastructure Amazon has. I’m sure it’s highly reliable, highly available, etc etc. But the price point is just too high for casual home use.

I have a Flickr Pro account which lets me upload all the pics I want, no limit, for a flat $25 bucks a year, give or take. So I would definitely choose Flickr over Amazon Cloud Service any time.

The really interesting thing to me though, is that their web interface looks very similar to the Google Docs interface. The basic layout is almost exactly the same. For 5Gb of free storage, I might be tempted to use Amazon Cloud Drive, except that as far as I can tell, you can’t do anything with the doc once you’ve uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive. With Google Docs on the other hand, there are lots of file types that I can work with online and never have to download them. With Amazon Cloud Drive, you’d have to download the files to work with them.  If I were Amazon, I’d be seriously looking to buy Zoho.com  or some other similar service and integrate it with Amazon Cloud Drive so you could, you know, actually do something useful with it.

So Amazon Cloud Drive is not going to be replacing the external hard drive I use for my back ups any time soon. I’m certainly not going to be keeping my 300Gb music library Amazon Cloud Drive at those prices. And it doesn’t even make table stakes in terms of competing with Google Docs (or Microsoft Live for that matter).

In general I’m a big fan of the Amazon Web Service offerings, but this one seems like a non-starter to me. Or at least I can’t figure out what the point of it is.