61–70 of 221 posts
Google needs to provide very simple native syncing apps that are equivalent to or better then Dropbox's and at the same time support several different platforms out of the gate to draw people away from Dropbox.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be really shocked if Google charged for a service like this, it fits in with Docs and Gmail which have both always been free and have made storage space easier to fully use. If anything, they will profit off of it by people investing in even more storage with them.
Docs and gmail let you slowly fill available space while being exposed to Google Ads. A Dropbox clone would let you fill available space quickly without ads.
YouTube, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are Type I sites, it's hard to switch from them to competitors because it's hard to do it individually, a large majority of the users must switch, too, creating a chicken and egg problem.
Google Search, Dropbox, etc. are of Type II. You use these sites just because they are better than the competition. As soon as this is not the case, you, individually, can easily switch. You may call these commodity sites. That's why Bing is such a big threat to Google, and Dropbox is doomed if Google comes up with cheaper plans and sync clients as good as theirs.
That being said, one shouldn't assume that Google will dominate any market they enter, they have the capability of doing do, but in practice this may not happen: putting too few people on the project, wrong design decisions, crappy clients, etc.
Dropbox is a brilliant piece of software however it's hard to justify more than $10/month for backup as a consumer. Since 50Gb only now covers my photos and docs, doesn't cover my music and even my photo collection's needs trimming to fit I would move to GDrive very quickly rather than double that spend to get to the next tier. I've long hoped that Dropbox would segment their pricing plans more. It's unsettling havin…
in the dropbox forums company representatives constantly comment that lower price plans are not feasible. That said, I've always been disappointed by companies that make you buy buckets of units (like postpaid cellphone plans) that they know you will never use rather than offering a per unit price. If the cost to provide 1gb of storage per month is higher than 10/50, than charge the higher price, don't hide it by shi…
Costs are also nonlinear. The most nonlinear are support costs. You may pay as much to support the user who pays $1 for your service as the user who pays $100. (Unless you keep a meter running and charge by the support-minute, which makes customers very unhappy.) And in practice it's even worse than that: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the customers who are obsessed with saving money cost more to support.
And let me emphasize that costs aren't even the key issue. Engineers tend to forget this, but the price of a product need have little to do with the cost of producing it. Products should be priced based on value to a customer, and that doesn't scale linearly either. The first few hundred MB of Dropbox are the most precious of all, partly because that's enough to sync my most critical and frequently-changing files, and partly because it includes the installation and setup overhead (and, probably, most of the support costs). Then the next few GB is somewhat less precious. By the time we reach a 49GB plan, the value-per-GB is significantly lower. I don't have 60GB of important stuff. Moreover, Dropbox is significantly less convenient when shlepping around huge amounts of data, because it's not magical: It takes time to sync all that stuff over my lame-O cable connection.
I think services/sites can be divided into two when considering how/if people switch between them: (i) aggregate sites whose value is a (generally nonlinear) function of all users who use the site and (ii) personal sites whose impact is just for the person who uses it. The fact that I'm using Dropbox, too, doesn't provide any value to you (except of course economies of scale) YouTube, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are Type I…
I think services/sites can be divided into two when considering how/if people switch between them: (i) aggregate sites whose value is a (generally nonlinear) function of all users who use the site and (ii) personal sites whose impact is just for the person who uses it. The fact that I'm using Dropbox, too, doesn't provide any value to you (except of course economies of scale) YouTube, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are Type I…
You may be underestimating the prevalence of Dropbox shared folders, which make Dropbox into more type I.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be really shocked if Google charged for a service like this, it fits in with Docs and Gmail which have both always been free and have made storage space easier to fully use. If anything, they will profit off of it by people investing in even more storage with them.
Docs and gmail let you slowly fill available space while being exposed to Google Ads. A Dropbox clone would let you fill available space quickly without ads.
It's in areas like this that Google sometimes oversteps the mark and veers dangerously close to "being evil" territory... in MY opinion. As I see it: Dropbox innovated, and they innovated well. It's inevitable that competition would arise, but competition on the scale Google can offer could well mean total annihilation for Dropbox, if annihilation is what Google pursues. Google doesn't "need" to enter this market. An…
Google's search engine would have never come into existence if their founders followed this line of thinking.
When I was in YC (same batch as Dropbox) this was a constant question. "What happens to Dropbox if Gdrive launches?" I don't actually remember what Drew and Arash thought, but a lot of people speculated on it. It was probably a real threat to them 4.5 years ago. I can't imagine it is now. Dropbox has a large, happy fanbase that's going to keep using it and keep spreading. They're going to keep growing. They've got a…
And if I were Dropbox, I'd worry like hell. Google isn't depending on making GDrive profitable from fees, so they can literally give it away.