Verizon announced the Share Everything plans in June on its website:
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Today we announced Share Everything Plans that will forever change the way customers purchase wireless services. With Share Everything Plans, our customers can get unlimited voice minutes, unlimited text, video and picture messaging and a single data allowance for up to 10 Verizon Wireless devices.
Share Everything Plans free customers from thinking about their voice and message plans because both are unlimited. With the new plans, customers select one data plan and share it with up to 10 mobile devices – including basic phones and 3G and 4G LTE smartphones, tablets, Jetpacks and notebooks. Share Everything Plans are simple and convenient.
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To read the full announcement, click here.
Other blog posts and online comments have discussed whether the shared plans will save money. In my experience, our family switched to it and it initially appeared like it would save $30 per month. However, one of our family mobile phones decided to misbehave and synced 9G of its owner's Yahoo! email account, exceeding our monthly mobile data limit and poof!, the $30 savings disappeared that month.
But I digress from the point of this post, which is about the impact of the share plans on the adoption of personal clouds.
To put the share plans into perspective, in speaking with mobile operators around the world, several offer the equivalent of shared or pooled data plans, or are strongly considering them. This is in recognition that many people are now using multiple mobile devices and it doesn't make sense to pay a separate wireless bill for each. Of course, many people just use wireless devices without cellular on WiFi. But if there was a way to use all or most of your mobile devices on your carrier's network, without paying separately for each, more people might do that and it could make an operator more valuable to its customers.
With the Verizon Share Everything Plan, there is still a separate charge for different devices, but at least they share a common pool of mobile bandwidth, which is a step in the right direction. But I digress again from the main point, which is the impact of it on personal clouds.
In our company's research, as well as reviewing research by others, and just talking to people about their use of personal clouds, one thing that stands out is that all things considered, most people would prefer not have multiple personal clouds if this could be avoided. They do not want one personal cloud for iPhone and another for Android and another for Windows, etc. It's too much hassle, and a whole point of a personal cloud is to make life easier, not complicated. Yet, the vast majority of the multiple devices and personal computers owned by people are made by different vendors i.e. they may have an Android phone and an iPad, or a BlackBerry and a MacBook or Windows computer, etc.
So their choice is to use different personal clouds for devices, which results in cloud data and content fragmentation, or use a personal cloud that supports all of their devices. When it comes to the latter, there are not many choices yet. As one example, Dropbox works on multiple devices but it does not do everything that iCloud does, so there are compromises.
The ideal scenario would be a personal cloud with the breadth of iCloud that works across different brands of devices. It should support more than just files but is open so users are not locked-in or forced to buy content from that service (iCloud offers iTunes Match as an extra cost option for this reason).
One possibility is the new version of Microsoft SkyDrive, as it supports multiple vendor devices. But the fundamental question is whether a personal cloud provider with its own hardware agenda is really going to optimize the user experience for other company devices. Do people really expect that Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM are going to expend a lot of resources making their personal cloud services hum on other company devices, or are they likely to make sure their service works best on their own devices?
It would seem that if operators offered a personal cloud service that supported multiple brands of devices in conjunction with shared data plans, that could be a major winner, as long as it is open, secure, easy-to-use and works well. I believe this is an important trend that may take hold. What do you think?
