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IMO the underlying assumption of Dropbox's competitiveness is that it is not a commodity. 1GB with the right user experience is worth more than more with a worse UX. Commodity would imply that it's all about price per gb. So far, I think that assumption has been right.
But how hard is it to tell an engineering team to just copy Dropbox? And then offer a lower price point or better OS integration?
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Google or Microsoft won't buy them. They're hedging their bet that this technology will be a commodity soon (Google Drive and SkyDrive). It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. They already told Apple to screw (albeit only at 800M). I think that Drew is a True Believer, where he thinks there is tremendous growth potential in this space. And hell, anything's possible. Who would have thought that such a simple idea…
Not sure if you are aware of it, but Amazon has a share in this space too, Amazon Cloud Drive[1] [1]- http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def/186-4662895...
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Depends what your definition of "good" is -- my company is about to switch to Box from Dropbox. Once you get to a certain size and have a certain type of user (non-power-users), Box is MUCH better for maintaining some organizational structure / permissions.
Is the overhead of having to maintain 'organizational structure / permissions.' worth it? Is your head count > 100?
But we've moved past that. A few months ago one of our sales guys was frustrated that his Macbook was out of hard drive space, so he went through and deleted everything that he didn't recognize. That included most of the shared Dropbox :) We didn't realize until a few days later when people started sending emails along the lines of "hey, where did ___ file go?" We sorted it out, but it cost us time, time, time.
Yes, I know it's easy to say "Well that was dumb of him - he should understand how Dropbox works", but one thing you learn about a growing company - particularly a non-tech one - is that not everyone "gets it" the way we geeks do, and at some point you have to stop blaming them and instead adapt to them.
Take that story and add another 200 iterations of it and you can see why sometimes, you need some structure and permissions and fine-grained control on a per-folder basis, and Dropbox doesn't have it yet while Box does.
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I have a few friends who work at Box, that company seems much better at extracting revenue from its product via concentrating on the business rather than consumer space.
Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people. Like most 'enterprise' stuff.
As another example, the Box authentication view controller on iOS has no real support for a cancel button. The web page displayed by it includes it's own faux toolbar at the top, which interferes visually with providing your own.
The problem I see is dropbox as a service becoming a commodity as competition in the sector ramps up. Apple is making a big push on cloud with airdrop and icloud, Tencent is offering 10tb storage. It's heating up and it's gonna be hard to maintain a viable USP.
Dropbox's use case might fit corporate use-case, but on the consumer side you rarely need XXX GB of high-availability storage for entire year - you need it for a short period of time, and it kinda stays unused most of the other time.
Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%? I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.
The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.
"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million." http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it. What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
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But how hard is it to tell an engineering team to just copy Dropbox? And then offer a lower price point or better OS integration?
Apparently decently hard
Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%? I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.
The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.
BitTorrent Sync is more lightweight.
I wish this wasn't the case because I would love to switch to something free and distributed, as it is I disable BTSync unless I'm plugged in.