Investigation into Tardigrade Marketing

Node Operators FAQ
1

The goal of this thread is to conclude in an unbiased evaluation of Storj Labs marketing of Tardigrade.

From SNO’s perspective there seems to be limited marketing for the platform that we supply the backbone from, and as we want to profit from the success of Tardigrade, we are of cause very interested in the marketing and want to make every possible figment of out imaginations into a business opportunity for Storj Labs, a company which while having a shared success and failure with the us the SNO’s which might not at all share the same views for the marketing steps required to make it Tardigrade a successful Product.

I think we have to accept that Storj Labs will most likely have spent more effort into answering these questions than we the crowd mind want to, so this should be an evaluation of the encompassing tactics and execution.

Time frame, i think it would be wise to end this a month or so before a town hall, to give Storj Labs the option and time for a clear and widely communicated response,
in case they wholly disagree with whatever conclusion we derive.

i hope Storj Labs will try to guide us in the direction of understanding their choices and how the marketing is suppose to work, this is not an assault, but an attempt to understand and get some answers that is useful and understandable for all involved.

because the question of why Tardigrade Marketing is lacking seems to pop up rather often, and i’m not convinced that there are any good and easy to understand answers that will put SNO’s continual worry to rest, so hopefully with this we can find those answers.

Very interested to see where this goes, ofc this “mission statement” will most likely change over time
oh yeah i forgot about the time frame, i think it the earliest we can conclude such an investigation is Q1 2021 and i would say i would almost expect it to go into Q2 2021 so that there is good time to dig into the subject, and take a lot of opinions and views into account.

Thank your for participating.

4 Likes
2

A post was split to a new topic: Article in DBTA

3

yeah, some of the key points that this investigation needs to be very aware of is that distributed cloud storage has certain inherent attributes that makes it different from any other type of storage.

When marketing Tardigrade one certainly cannot compare it to something like AWS glacier, since the technological differences makes it a bit like comparing SSD storage to HDD storage or magnetic tape data storage.

They have vastly different use cases, and one isn’t really better than the other, just like data tape storage isn’t better or worse than SSD’s… they are different technologies used side by side with very different costs, technological advantages and disadvantages unique to both.

It is however easy for people without detailed knowledge to compare stuff and deem one thing superior to another, when the fact of the matter is that it’s rarely that simple.

So SNO’s says there isn’t enough marketing, but most SNO’s aren’t universities or such possible prime targets for the distributed cloud storage technology…

or that SNO’s complain that they can store their data cheaper with AWS glacier, which is most likely right, but it has other limitations that might not be applicable to their use cases.

Personally i think Tardigrade is well placed to become huge in data storage.

2 Likes
4

The Storj marketing strategy hasn’t change in the last 5 years, a time where most of the sno’s where running on an ADSL links with quotas. Times have change, now most of us run on unlimited Gbs fibers, where storage has a cost, disk drive and CPU investment, electricity usage, but bandwidth is free and high.
We have a completely different business model now and customer target, the big centralized data centers target corporations reassured by data centers located in bunkers with triple redundant power, data links and secure access.
Our market is users uncomfortable to store personal data on Amazon or Google server’s.
The Tardigrade pricing structure doesn’t make any sense for anyone, the corporate won’t spend a dime on unproven technology and the personal users won’t spend $45/TB restore charge when a spare HDD cost $20/TB.
Charging more on data storage (like twice as much) and way less on egress (like 1/10th) would open-up a market.
An other market are streaming platforms (Netflix, Amazon etc…) they are charged by many foreign ISP’s for the bandwidth usage, if we where acting as a local proxy on the local ISP network both the ISP and the steamer would save on the infrastructures.
A compagnie like Storj to be successful has to listen to its customers and adapt to the market needs, which evolve pretty rapidly in the internet market.

4 Likes
5

valid but misunderstood points i believe

actually the prices changed since i started on Storj V2 3 years ago… the storage value pr tb was lowered, so saying they don’t adapt to the market is just plain wrong…
also i recently wanted to try to redirect my data through microsoft azure and to my surprise the cost of doing that, ended up to exactly 20$ per TB… i know home users that doesn’t really deal with large scale networking / storage or it’s problems cannot see why Tardigrade is a cheap solution.

Tardigrade Advantages
Tardigrade is good at replacing storage solutions that require:

insane internet bandwidth (this is like off the charts compared to other solutions)
like comparing a jetfighter to a horse drawn cart

high redundancy data

high level of security data

a disconnect from the users geographical location
(thus making it difficult to be affected by real world events)

that was the advantages, now for the disadvantages, because storj isn’t perfect and especially not for everybody.

Tardigrade Disadvantage:

Idle costs
(holding data in Tardigrade isn’t free, and because storagenodes fail, there will be a continual utilization and processing just to keep the data viable, which makes it in the expensive end when looking at the essential costs of the storage, even without using the data)

Latency
( this is not really an issue in all cases, but in most if comparing to a local data center, tardigrade is slow and it will always be slower than the competition here, it simply takes time to coordinate a crowd of computers and to send and receive data)

Electricity costs
(i duno what exactly the ratio of electricity costs pr tb stored, vs pr tb downloaded and such is… but it’s certainly cannot compete with a single point storage solution… ofc some of the issues with the single point solution is the lack of bandwidth and thus bandwidth maybe being 100times higher means it might take 1% the time to transfer the same data, and thus only 1% the electricity costs…
but still distributed cloud just runs kinda high on idle… like the jet example, even on idle is pretty fuel and maintenance demanding… while you can let the horse graze anywhere, it doesn’t really have any inherent costs to the user… just like a hdd on a shelf won’t, vs tardigrade data being basically alive)

Conclusion
Basically Tardigrade isn’t advantageous to most private users, because it doesn’t complement a private use case.