Amazon's Dropbox & Google Drive challenger, Zocalo, is now ready for you to use

Amazon Web Services, the market-leading public-cloud division of e-commerce giant Amazon.com, today released its file-sharing service, Zocalo.

It’s a full-featured piece of cloud software that could shake up Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. Perhaps more important, the service could boost adoption of the cloud-computing infrastructure underlying Zocalo.

Amazon is tempting people with 200GB per user for as many as 50 users in a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $5 per user per month for that amount of storage, according to a blog post today. Prices go up based on companies’ storage needs.

Meanwhile, the fast-growing Google Drive for Work service provides unlimited storage to businesses for $10 per user per month.

Amazon first announced Zocalo last month. The news got people in the cloud world talking once again about Amazon’s habit of taking bites out of its own ecosystem, as Amazon cloud customer Dropbox partly depends on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

In the eight years since Amazon introduces Amazon Web Services, the company has rolled out several services that extend the reach of its cloud. That’s smart, as such moves diversify Amazon and provide some semblance of leadership in a rapidly commoditizing market. Google and Microsoft have shown their commitment to cutting cloud infrastructure prices and effectively stay competitive with Amazon in that market.

But Amazon has for many years demonstrated its capability to rapidly cut the prices of many of its cloud services. That practice should apply to Zocalom, too, which is why younger companies, like Dropbox and Box, ought to consider themselves warned.