Kingsoft Kuaipan

» see kuaipan.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i knew Kingsoft as a software company. its WPS Office, the chinese suite that opened Word and Excel files for free, ended up on machines all over the world, including one or two i sat at. i did not know Kingsoft also ran a cloud drive, and i never used the thing, because Kuaipan lived inside the chinese internet and never left it. i came to it going down a list of dead chinese cloud services, most of which died within months of each other.

Kuaipan launched in april 2010 as a sync drive, the kind of service where a folder on your computer quietly copies itself to a server and shows up on your phone and your other machines. it was china's version of Dropbox, and it grew fast. by early 2012 it had passed twelve million users holding billions of files, and it kept climbing from there. Kingsoft ran it as a serious product, not a side project.

in 2014 Xunlei, the download company, bought the consumer side of Kuaipan for around thirty-three million dollars and renamed it after itself. that looked like a normal handover of a growing service. it was actually two years from the end.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the postmortem ~

what killed Kuaipan was not competition, it was a policy. in 2016 the chinese authorities ran a campaign against personal cloud storage, uneasy about what people were keeping and sharing on these drives. one after another the services announced they were closing their consumer accounts, the big portals' drives and Kuaipan alongside them. it was a whole category switched off in a single year by decision rather than by market.

Kuaipan gave its users a window. it stopped the personal storage service and told people to pull their files by the end of june 2016, with a short extension into august for accounts tied to a Xiaomi login. on the sixteenth of august the individual service ended for good and whatever was left got deleted. the company itself did not die, it turned toward video and moved on.

~ the inheritance ~

the strange part is what the closures taught the chinese internet, that a file you keep in someone else's cloud is only yours until the rules change. hundreds of millions of people learned in one year to distrust the convenient drive and to keep local copies of anything that mattered.

i never had a file on Kuaipan to lose. but the lesson traveled further than the product did, and anyone who has ever felt uneasy handing a folder to a company they do not control is feeling something Kuaipan's users learned the hard way in the summer of 2016.

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