I have a cloud service dream. It's a variant of the old network computer, where every piece of my data is accessible from any of my computers. But it's not all about webapps. Gmail is fine, but many functions need native apps, like video editing and development. It's ok to have to install native apps on each computer — that's something you just do once. But the data should have copies on each computer for offline work, and sync to the cloud for safety and access.

As much as I'd like to use it, Amazon's Cloud Drive doesn't really get me further toward my dream.

The interface for Dropbox is the gold standard in cloud data storage. Local files really are local, and changes are synced without any user intervention at all. Amazon's web-based, manual approach is clunky by comparison. Just like how users only backup if it's done silently for them in the background, cloud sync should be invisible to the user or it won't be done.

Perhaps some enterprising developer will build a Dropbox-like client for Amazon Cloud Drive. But for Amazon to miss this critical aspect is worrisome.

The service itself is finally one that I would trust with critical data. When Amazon advertises that you should "never worry about losing your files again" on Cloud Drive, they actually have a chance to pull that off. Amazon's AWS services (such as S3 and EC2) have demonstrated their ability to meet a highly reliable SLA, and Could Drive is based on the same technology.

But it's still too costly. The free 5GB is just a teaser, like Dropbox's 2GB. The rate of $1/GB/year is just too high a multiple of the cost of local disk. A 2TB external drive will cost around $100 and last a couple of years, but the Cloud Drive equivalent is $2,000 per year.

The last barrier is the network — and unfortuntely this is completely out of Amazon's hands. With broadband speeds in the 5-10 Mbps range, pulling down a ton of data just takes too long. The synced up cloud drive works great for source code, documents, and save files from other applications. But once users turn to 50GB music libraries, 500GB home movie folders, or (perfectly legally obtained) terabyte sized movie archives, the network becomes the bottleneck. It just takes too much time to pull down meaningful portions of the data.

The network and cost limitations are why the 5GB free limit will be good enough for many people — because people won't bother trying to host a 1TB movie library on it.

I applaud the service — Amazon is poised to deliver cloud services with reliability unmatched by other companies. But it's incremental. It's not the quantum leap I'm looking for to be able to live entirely in the cloud.