How Dropbox Will Die
forbes.com
How Dropbox Will Die
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#2I wrote something about this in another thread. I don't think dropbox will die, and here is why:
Dropbox is only a 'feature' if you already have everything else, an operating system, and an installed base of a large number of devices.
But dropbox the product, not dropbox the feature is what exists today.
Seamless filesharing at an affordable pricepoint (including a free tier) across all devices and across all major operating systems, including linux, apple and windows. And that includes versioning and so on.
So it isn't a feature.
Don't forget that the universe of computing is far larger than any single operating system, no matter how successful, and that this will likely always be the case.
Dropbox is infrastructure, not a feature. And it's fine to run infrastructure, you can actually charge for it and people will pay. See also: toll roads, ISPs, the petroleum industry, your power company and so on.
Commoditizing the essence of storage wasn't such a bad idea at all, and to turn it into a product, not just a feature is what gives it long term viability.
Forbes being a print magazine I'd bet good money that Forbes the print edition will die long before dropbox.
Besides dropbox having about 250 million factors in the equation helping it to stay alive a little longer Forbes writing about it in two different places on one day will help dropbox just that much more. There is no such thing as bad advertising. Plenty of the Forbes visitors reading this might think, ok, dropbox is going to die, but until then this is mighty handy.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#3"(I should probably do a post explaining why Evernote is an application and Dropbox only a feature.)"
Yes, this would be great. A lot of this article seems to be based on the author's very loose and short definition of a feature, so I didn't really get a lot out of it. A comparison would help me better understand the point trying to be made here.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#4"There is also the question of how Dropbox is different from an online backup service available on a file-by-file basis across multiple machines. That is how I use Dropbox, only occasionally sharing files in Dropbox with friends and coworkers."
And with that I realized I had wasted my time reading this article. How can a journalist be so oblivious to the primary use case of a product?
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#5Given that Gartner estimated OSX as having only about 10% of the desk/laptop market share in 2011, the idea that Dropbox is going to be put out of business by iCloud is laughably ignorant. Unless Apple decides to make iCloud available to Windows users, but IMHO that seems unlikely.
The competition isn't much better on the MS side. Windows has the bulk of the desktop/laptop users, but it's pretty unlikely for them to offer a file sync client that'll work with the iPhone or Android, and Windows Phone 7 is still looking for an audience.
I do agree that Dropbox could do a lot to make their person-to-person sharing more compelling and easy.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#6I think it is a silly article with a link bait headline. The author has taken his very narrow use cases and extrapolated it to all users. If he can replace dropbox with evernote then he is using dropbox in a very different way from me, not to mention that his implicit message seems to be that all operating systems are going to become Apple-owned, which is silly. Yes, icloud might hurt dropbox but that's a far cry from a death knell.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#7In those critical first few seconds where I am determining if I want to read further, and instead I have to battle text jumping around because of ads, it makes me wonder if anyone at Forbes cares about usability.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#8I've often thought they need a lower tier than the $100/year option. I get a remarkable amount of value from Dropbox, but somehow knowing I'm only using < 20% of the free tier makes it psychologically difficult to justify paying them $100/yr. If there were an option to pay $20 or $30 or so for what I'm getting for free, I'd probably just do it. $100 is a little too far outside the no-brainer price range for me though... (I guess by the time you get to "9 digit acquisition offer" size, a "donate via Paypal" button would look pretty low-rent...)
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#9I think it is a silly article with a link bait headline. The author has taken his very narrow use cases and extrapolated it to all users. If he can replace dropbox with evernote then he is using dropbox in a very different way from me, not to mention that his implicit message seems to be that all operating systems are going to become Apple-owned, which is silly. Yes, icloud might hurt dropbox but that's a far cry fro…
My guess is that this is not necessarily the opinion of the writer, he was just given the task of writing a short article with a contrarian view on Dropbox.
Re: How Dropbox Will Die
#10If Dropbox solves this, they're golden: http://xkcd.com/949/
If they don't, they'll die.