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People often tend to forget that storage as offered by the likes of dropbox is not a product, its just a feature that makes a product better. With deep app plat

by barista 14y ago

People often tend to forget that storage as offered by the likes of dropbox is not a product, its just a feature that makes a product better. With deep app platform integration that iOS, Windows have brought in, there will be less and less need for people to use an external store thus making these guys irrelevant...

tagx 14y ago
What is Dropbox's product in your opinion then?
ananddass 14y ago
Would respectfully disagree. Dropbox and Box are building an awesome app platform as well and as long as users want neutral solutions (non iOS or Windows), they should be OK. In fact Box and Dropbox will start specializing as the author noted.
- Mythbusters 14y ago
  When you say neutral solutions, you are assuming that the API developed by Apple and Microsoft can only be accessed from these platforms. I know that that's not true at least for SkyDrive API. Given these why would I choose a neutral API?
  - kijin 14y ago
    Try using any Apple product on Windows, or any Microsoft product on Linux. It might work, but it's often quite painful.
- niels_olson 14y ago
  I definitely benefit primarily from Dropbox's neutrality. Much as I benefit from the neutrality of lastpass and xmarks. I can use them at home on the latest Mac and Linux, I can use them on personal VPS instances, I can use them at work, even in a fairly locked down network environment. iCloud is useless at work, and my officemate has switched from SkyDrive to Dropbox for the same reasons. We now both doubly benefit from the wide-ranging accessability and sharability of Dropbox.
  - barista 14y ago
    are you confusing neutrality with it being a web app? What part of the above things you could not do with say skydrive? Basically I don't see a difference between dropbox and skydrive (or gdrive or....) as a developer, if I had to choose, I'd probably choose a platform from a company that has a long history of building platforms (Microsoft or Google or any other big co) as opposed to dropbox which is a tiny startup somewhere with no viable long term life expectancy.
    - oscilloscope 14y ago
      Dropbox has a Linux version. It's not a web app. I've used it in Unity/Gnome/Nautilus. It feels exactly right. It also works perfectly on OS X, Windows, Android and iOS.
herval 14y ago
dropbox is a hell of an amazing, slick product. Although I see it getting cheaper, I don't see it being turned irrelevant by the likes of iCloud or Skydrive (although Skydrive is making a decent job on being platform independent - but so far, it's just "another dropbox")
- duaneb 14y ago
  I want google drive but with the widespread use of dropbox.
dasil003 14y ago
You're making two big assumptions. First, that Microsoft or Apple are able to perfect these services, which so far they have not been able to do, and there is good reason that it may be impossible. But assuming that it's good enough, you still need to commit entirely to one ecosystem. Certainly some people can do that, but some people can't, particularly as BYOD becomes more common in business. This is the magic of Dropbox. They make a dead simple product, they make it available everywhere, but they don't overreach. So in the end you have something that's harder to use and can't get the novice adoption that Apple brings, but on the other hand, most people understand what a folder is these days, and what Dropbox does is conceptually several orders of magnitude easier than trying to figure out exactly how iCloud works and what edge cases are going bring about catastrophe. The old "that's a feature not a product" line is clever, but it's been overused to death. I don't know the source of the quote, but I'm pretty sure it was originally to address the fact that a startup needs to have an asymmetric attack to succeed against large incumbents. If something can be trivially replicated then it can be copied by the large company and smothered simply by the marketing heft of the goliath. If on the other hand, the very nature of the product is something that has a parity mismatch with large companies, then they can not directly attack it. Dropbox has a bit of that because making a cross-platform service like that just isn't worth the money for an Apple or a Microsoft. It doesn't tie into their cash cows and it's not a big enough market by itself. Dropbox is not a direct competitor to them anyway, it's more of a symbiotic relationship, so who's going to kill them?
- barista 14y ago
  >you still need to commit entirely to one ecosystem I don't know why you said that. Skydrive API at least are available to most popular platforms it seems.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    Because I was thinking of iCloud and I don't really know anything about SkyDrive. Forgive me if I'm skeptical that Microsoft is gonna blast that one out of the park.
sjs 14y ago
How is it not a product? Technically I would call it a service but regardless, how is it not a product or service?
shanemhansen 14y ago
There's some truth to that w/ respect to the "cloud" storage services out there. Basically it costs $X dollars/month to host your data in a datacenter (with bandwidth and cooling costs). So what we have now are several providers that basically offer the same service (a special folder and/or syncing) for roughly the same price. Look out in the next few months for companies that will disrupt classical client/server datacenter based storage with peer-to-peer protocols and in home devices (which don't have the same cost constraints that datacenters have). These product offering will in some ways be similar to dropbox, icloud, etc, but they will be an order of magnitude cheaper and an order of magnitude faster. I work at one of these companies. http://spacemonkey.com/ http://spacemonkey.com/ If you're interested in P2P storage and distributed systems check us out, we're hiring.
- jasonzemos 14y ago
  A system like that will never work.

by barista 14y ago

tagx 14y ago

What is Dropbox's product in your opinion then?

ananddass 14y ago

Would respectfully disagree. Dropbox and Box are building an awesome app platform as well and as long as users want neutral solutions (non iOS or Windows), they should be OK. In fact Box and Dropbox will start specializing as the author noted.

Mythbusters 14y ago
When you say neutral solutions, you are assuming that the API developed by Apple and Microsoft can only be accessed from these platforms. I know that that's not true at least for SkyDrive API. Given these why would I choose a neutral API?
- kijin 14y ago
  Try using any Apple product on Windows, or any Microsoft product on Linux. It might work, but it's often quite painful.
niels_olson 14y ago
I definitely benefit primarily from Dropbox's neutrality. Much as I benefit from the neutrality of lastpass and xmarks. I can use them at home on the latest Mac and Linux, I can use them on personal VPS instances, I can use them at work, even in a fairly locked down network environment. iCloud is useless at work, and my officemate has switched from SkyDrive to Dropbox for the same reasons. We now both doubly benefit from the wide-ranging accessability and sharability of Dropbox.
- barista 14y ago
  are you confusing neutrality with it being a web app? What part of the above things you could not do with say skydrive? Basically I don't see a difference between dropbox and skydrive (or gdrive or....) as a developer, if I had to choose, I'd probably choose a platform from a company that has a long history of building platforms (Microsoft or Google or any other big co) as opposed to dropbox which is a tiny startup somewhere with no viable long term life expectancy.
  - oscilloscope 14y ago
    Dropbox has a Linux version. It's not a web app. I've used it in Unity/Gnome/Nautilus. It feels exactly right. It also works perfectly on OS X, Windows, Android and iOS.

herval 14y ago

dropbox is a hell of an amazing, slick product. Although I see it getting cheaper, I don't see it being turned irrelevant by the likes of iCloud or Skydrive (although Skydrive is making a decent job on being platform independent - but so far, it's just "another dropbox")

duaneb 14y ago
I want google drive but with the widespread use of dropbox.

dasil003 14y ago

You're making two big assumptions. First, that Microsoft or Apple are able to perfect these services, which so far they have not been able to do, and there is good reason that it may be impossible. But assuming that it's good enough, you still need to commit entirely to one ecosystem. Certainly some people can do that, but some people can't, particularly as BYOD becomes more common in business. This is the magic of Dropbox. They make a dead simple product, they make it available everywhere, but they don't overreach. So in the end you have something that's harder to use and can't get the novice adoption that Apple brings, but on the other hand, most people understand what a folder is these days, and what Dropbox does is conceptually several orders of magnitude easier than trying to figure out exactly how iCloud works and what edge cases are going bring about catastrophe. The old "that's a feature not a product" line is clever, but it's been overused to death. I don't know the source of the quote, but I'm pretty sure it was originally to address the fact that a startup needs to have an asymmetric attack to succeed against large incumbents. If something can be trivially replicated then it can be copied by the large company and smothered simply by the marketing heft of the goliath. If on the other hand, the very nature of the product is something that has a parity mismatch with large companies, then they can not directly attack it. Dropbox has a bit of that because making a cross-platform service like that just isn't worth the money for an Apple or a Microsoft. It doesn't tie into their cash cows and it's not a big enough market by itself. Dropbox is not a direct competitor to them anyway, it's more of a symbiotic relationship, so who's going to kill them?

barista 14y ago
>you still need to commit entirely to one ecosystem I don't know why you said that. Skydrive API at least are available to most popular platforms it seems.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Because I was thinking of iCloud and I don't really know anything about SkyDrive. Forgive me if I'm skeptical that Microsoft is gonna blast that one out of the park.

sjs 14y ago

How is it not a product? Technically I would call it a service but regardless, how is it not a product or service?

shanemhansen 14y ago

There's some truth to that w/ respect to the "cloud" storage services out there. Basically it costs $X dollars/month to host your data in a datacenter (with bandwidth and cooling costs). So what we have now are several providers that basically offer the same service (a special folder and/or syncing) for roughly the same price. Look out in the next few months for companies that will disrupt classical client/server datacenter based storage with peer-to-peer protocols and in home devices (which don't have the same cost constraints that datacenters have). These product offering will in some ways be similar to dropbox, icloud, etc, but they will be an order of magnitude cheaper and an order of magnitude faster. I work at one of these companies. http://spacemonkey.com/ http://spacemonkey.com/ If you're interested in P2P storage and distributed systems check us out, we're hiring.

jasonzemos 14y ago
A system like that will never work.