Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox
Admittedly around 6,000 things aren't that interesting:
>As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing
the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace. i don't have any documents. google has documents that i have authored, and i can retrieve them from google any time i want to, but i don't have them and i don't have to worry about where they're stored. i don't need a service to keep them synced between my computers because they're not on my computers. i let google worry about delivering them to me.
>there keeps being new kinds of data beyond binary files
this is what i'm talking about. dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited.
That's why Dropbox will continue to annihilate any service that doesn't locally save data. If my files are in Dropbox I can freely access them on the laptop I used to create them whether I'm sitting in a hotel that has so many stars you have to pay for WiFi or on a beach in Thailand. And the next time I have my laptop on within the range of publicly accessible free WiFi, it's all in the "cloud". If the internet connection is extremely intermittent I can have my updates save asynchronously without the endless frustration of browser error messages (or even worse, an Ajax smokescreen concealing the failure of an app to update server-side).
And even if I'm sitting in my office with a perfect high-speed connection doing average office work, the chances are that at some stage I'll be using a program with functionality not available in filesystem-less SaaS. In which case I don't really begrudge the extra few gigs of disk space Dropbox takes over pure cloud hosting.
> the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace
You then list how you have new digital data in the form of Google documents :-) They used to only have a few types of data ("documents" and spreadsheets). You now also get presentations, drawings, forms, tables and collections. And guess what, Google do indeed provide a crappy subset of their experience. Have you every tried to edit/view a Google doc on an Android device? I'd be delighted to have those docs also sitting in Dropbox available on all my devices at all times and to the many local programs I have that provide better viewers/editors than Google ever will. (Note this doesn't mean I want Dropbox to be the primary location for them, just that I want Dropbox to provide enhanced access and backup.)
> dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited
It does handle photos and sharing. I agree that binary plus photos is limiting, but the whole point is that by expanding beyond that they will have the opportunity for growth.
You should really automate backups of your google docs to local storage. I've lost data when documents inexplicably disappeared.
It's not really where you are now that matters, but where you end up going. And Drew's a really smart guy and maniacally focused on his company. It's quite possible he sees things about their market that we don't.
evil laugh
https://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
They also sell extra space, shared with Picasa.
With Dropbox, 100GB would cost me $199/year.
I've been with Dropbox forever (I have account #315) but man, it is tempting to snag 80GB for the price of half a tank of gas.
Convenience is obviously the primary loss. But I'm a nerd. It would likely be easy to figure out some way of auto-syncing my whole music folder.
My other primary usage for Dropbox (and incidentally the motivation for its inception) is as a way to transfer files to other people. There's nothing like being able to host your own .html file within your own dropbox with literally zero effort. That said, a hybrid of the two seems best -- ridiculously cheap bulk storage, combined with the convenience of Dropbox when needed.
How about Open Graph or the Facebook Platform?
Think if dropbox has a platform. (like word processors saving directly to Dropbox - the defacto cloud storage network)
I see dropbox files as MY FILES. I don't like when
they are obscured behind some application
I hate it when I'm on my iPad and have to do all sorts of stupid tricks to move files between applications. It's just stupid. But I'm sure Apple will fix most of the nightmare in iOS 6. But I must side with Steve Jobs when he said "When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system." Average computer users have extremely cluttered and unorganized folders and desktops. Dropbox does not help that.
I think Apple's strategy will work better for them (in the long term) than that of Dropbox's... “A lot of us have been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system so the user doesn't have to learn about it.” (Jobs, WWDC 2011)
And this is my favorite quote about Dropbox:
"Dropbox... It's a feature, not a company"! (Steve Jobs)If documents, files and folders were intuitive and efficient, you wouldn't have relatively huge administrative staffs at medical clinics, real estate offices, banks, law offices, government institutions, schools, et cetera.
Plus it is not like dropbox has set it's goal to do the one and the only thing that is file sync. That was a good goal to achieve until this point.
"Dropbox... It's a feature, not a company"! (Steve Jobs)
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html
I don't think current technology (i.e. actual implementations) comes close to getting past this sort of psychological barrier yet.
Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.
Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
Even when you count out the cloud future, how can Dropbox stay competitive against Google's infrastructure? They have peering contracts and their own servers.
It's not that convenient, but that's the tradeoff when you want client side encryption.
I didn't try Bitcasa yet since I got today an invitation.
What does Google do? Web search. Someone else is doing it, but they just do it better.
Yes, what Dropbox does right now does not add up to much, but if they keep expanding their usefulness they could end up reaching a critical mass. Dropbox' business is not a niche: everyone needs effortless backups and file sharing. Everyone. Tomorrow they could be a major cloud storage company indeed.
Replicating Apple's brand/image is what's hard. That brand has taken years of focusing on Apple's/Steve Jobs's particular style of doing business and building products. We see people trying now to replicate that, but it took Apple all of the 2000s to get its brand to where it is.
Not many, because it's hard and risky and - drum roll - difficult to replicate! Which brings us back to why I feel a direct comparison between Dropbox and Apple/Google is flawed: Dropbox presents comparatively little consumer value that is difficult to replicate. Hell, they don't even handle their own storage, Amazon does.
I don't think so. IMO, companies do not focus on their image and consumer experience because most CEOs are not entrepreneurs, and lack vision. They have risen to the top not only because of their performance, but mostly because they have been very good at office politics. Think about companies who have a strong personality instead: don't you realize they are run - have been run - by entrepreneurs (Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, etc.)? OTOH, for CEOs who do not own their company, focus is most exclusively either on their company's stockholders or their company's board of directors.
> Hell, they don't even handle their own storage, Amazon does.
It's called "outsourcing". The most successful fashion companies do not own any factories (Nike, etc.).
EDIT: Actually, it has just occurred to me that some companies which have a strong personality without having an entrepreneur as their CEO are companies which do not own their assets, that is companies whose main product is marketing.
Just my thoughts.
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm (Windows) http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmai... (Linux userland FS driver) http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/ (Mac)