4 ms·

If nearly every service on the Internet uses the Dropbox feature, it will likely be as big as Apple / Google

Helianthus 15y ago
Competition will drive prices down such that even if Dropbox corners the market they won't have the revenue of Apple or Google. I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.
- brk 15y ago
  They're not selling either. They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome. Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC. And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this. Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task. Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users. One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized. I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices. Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
  - toomuchtodo 15y ago
    Everything you described with regards to your contacts lists I've already been doing with Google Contacts (work contacts, shared contacts with wife, etc). My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background). Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
- mutagen 15y ago
  > I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders. On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard. Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.

Competition will drive prices down such that even if Dropbox corners the market they won't have the revenue of Apple or Google. I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.

brk 15y ago
They're not selling either. They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome. Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC. And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this. Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task. Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users. One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized. I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices. Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
- toomuchtodo 15y ago
  Everything you described with regards to your contacts lists I've already been doing with Google Contacts (work contacts, shared contacts with wife, etc). My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background). Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
mutagen 15y ago
> I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders. On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard. Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.