I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever"
Horrible term? Just because it's the catch phrase du jour doesn't mean it's totally meaningless. I get annoyed with the buzz and malapropism just as much as the next guy, but like it or not, cloud computing is a major global phenomenon.
It IS a meaningless phrase in the sense that it's being used.
When I was studying network engineering, "the cloud" used to encompass the broader network environment that INCLUDED the Internet as an extension of your enterprise infrastructure. Now? It's a hyperbolic, singular phrase that is limited to using the internet as an extension of your operating system without fully explaining or at least detailing for the end user why it matters.
Especially in the case of those god.awful Microsoft commercials. In their case, the way it's presented, the cloud is nothing less synonymous with social networking. Change your Facebook status from Windows? That's the cloud. Upload a picture to Flickr? That's the cloud. It's no better than that phase of 'web 2.0' that was nothing more than superficial design elements that included shiny buttons, dropping vowels and slapping the term 'beta' on everything. The web is cyclical and this is the latest cycle.
While that in and of itself isn't BAD per se, it's a phrase that's come synonymous with "rockstar" and "ninja" when talking about hiring developers. A total and complete non sequitur.
Any way I try to define it(other than how CNN puts it) I end up leaving out a huge chunk of cos that also claim to be into cloud computing. And I am not exCtly sure if anyone is in a position or authority to tell them "no you've got nothing to do with the cloud".
It still is a horrible term, as are most buzz words and hypes.
And secondly, like it or not, it is nothing new - not even a new concept. See e.g. grid computing and what Foster et al. describe as "utility computing" in their vision; it makes cloud computing look more like a sub-category.
I have the same feeling about "web 2.0" - it was merely "normal people" catching up with the tech savvy crowd on a large scale.
What is fascinating to me is how quickly dropbox spread outside the HN demographic. My 70 year old mother, who was as far from a techical user as one could be, asked me in early 2009 if I used dropbox so she could share some photos with me. That's when I realized they were really on to something. It was just that easy to use, and it was spreading very rapidly in non-technical communities - they had reached a user like my mother within 6 months of public release. Unbelievable, and a real testament to the simplicity and elegance of the product.
I recently got my dad's large real estate brokerage to start using Dropbox for all of their file sharing. Anyone who's ever worked in or near realty could tell you that the technology in the market is usually 5-10 years (at least) behind where it should be, so I considered this a huge accomplishment.
I'm biased because I write for Fortune Magazine, but you put this perfectly. To prove your point, when I wrote about Twitter in Fortune in August, 2008, which was one of the first general business press articles about Twitter, I was well aware that 1) all the cool kids knew about it and 2) the rest of the country, Fortune's readers, did not. Here is that article, which seems a little quaint now: http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/06/technology/true_meaning_of_t...
Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normally email to each other in to the Dropbox folder, and magically it will appear on the other computer. BONUS! If you make changes, they're automatically shared in the other direction. Keep it under 2 GB and you get this for free.
The response I get from users is consistently that of complete astonishment. Registering for and installing Dropbox is, for many people, a more straight forward process than getting file sharing working. Dropbox scratches a very common itch.
If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.
From what I remember of Windows 98, it was really simple. If you shared something on the network, it was shared to everyone on the network. No passwords, no permissions, no home groups, everything was just shared. I wish Windows 7 could do this for me.
With Windows 7, I need to connect to a network, customise my security settings so that files can be shared, and even then I need to go into advanced permissions and add a user called 'Everyone' to every folder I share, just so that other people can access them. Sharing on Windows in its current format is unaccessible and difficult.
(Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm very computer literate and it's a fight every time I want to share something, so I can't imagine it's easy for 'mum and dad' users)
I had huge problems ever getting LAN sharing set up on Win98. It seemed like the only way was to reboot both of the machines at exactly the same time, plus mystic dance moves, etc. Often one machine could see the other, or you could browse but not access files, the 'network neighborhood' would show then not show the other machine, and so on. Like most of the rest of Win98, it was unstable to the point that one wondered how MS could keep a straight face when releasing it. But then, sometimes it would work with no problem at all.
Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.
That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that).
For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.
I get the feeling that Apple is preparing another big push into this area. Between cloud-iTunes, the mega datacenter, and rumors of some sort of new iPad sync system they've got plans for sure.
the reason it didn't catch on is because it was terrible to work with. it did not synchronize consistently. it would detect that changes had been made in multiple locations, then just keep extra copies -- leaving the user wondering why the number of files suddenly exploded. I used it for a bit, and finally gave up because it was too much hassle.
Not sure what the status is now, but for a long time Microsoft intentionally limited the file-sharing (and printer-sharing) capabilities of their "home" class OSes, to avoid cannibalizing sales of their "office/server" class OSes.
It would be incredibly interesting if your dropbox machines all ran a bitorrent client that auto shared the syncing between them all.
With logic to determine which machines are closest (in bandwidth)
So that if I have my 5+ machines at home (desktops, laptops and phones, which all have the client on them) - they all see that they are on the same subnet and sync very fast between each other.
Then update the cloud at the same time - in the same fashion... chop all the changes up amongst the machines. (sure, I still have a single pipe via my cable modem - but this would be helpful when I am on work lan too...)
EDIT: it would be great to see an added layer of service on Dropbox such as the old Hamachi personal VPN services...
Eventually - Ill be able to have a completely distributed, virtualized personal network across any machine I have an account...
Of course it is. My bigger surprise is that it doesn't feature what I now think of as the ultimate Dropbox evangelising line: "It's a folder. That syncs".
There's this tunnel vision that propagates in highly specialized communities like HN. Stepping back and viewing things from the bigger picture is a skill that is highly underrated.
That being said, from my personal observations, Dropbox is knocking on the door and about to have a push outside of the core tech community. This article is just another sign that Dropbox is about to make a big push.
I agree, this will be big for dropbox and they deserve the acknowledgement. However I think a lot of us here feel the same way, which you can deem as somewhat childish. Its the sentiment "we were here first".
Dropbox wasn't the first such product and you can argue better ones exist out there. What they have done is make a product with little or no friction to get up and running across multiple devices. That is the power of their product. It is super easy to use and difficult to break. A lot of companies can learn from their success and focus on user experience.
My Son's elementary school principal sends the PTA newsletter out via email with a link to it in his Dropbox. He couldn't figure out how to attach it to the email. I think Dropbox may be a bit more well known outside of the "techie" crowd more than you think.
I've been shocked at how often I see the Dropbox icon on friend's systems. I no longer live in silicon valley, and so I am completely out of the echo chamber (except what I read here at HN). These are not nerds, not techies, and not people who follow TechCrunch. These are artists, musicians, old folks, nomads, and all sorts of folks that just don't do technology. But, they get Dropbox. Admittedly, my parents aren't using Dropbox, but my parents don't read CNN.com, either, and I can't imagine what they would even use Dropbox for. I can't even get them to use flickr for photos, despite buying them a digital camera (my mom still uses a film camera when she travels because she's afraid she'll lose or break the digital one).
If I could invest in Dropbox, I would. But, that wasn't always true. I met Drew at a YC party before they had anything to show, and were still figuring out the diffing/versioning problems, and all the underlying hard problems. And, I came away thinking, "Well, that's been done before. A lot. And it never went anywhere." I had even built a little web-based file manager and sharing app as a RoR practice app, a couple weeks before. So, I thought I knew a business that wouldn't go anywhere when I saw it. I thought highly of Drew, but not much of the idea. I was obviously very wrong about the idea.
Anyway, my point is, Dropbox hasn't been something "you've never heard of" for quite some time.
>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."
Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.
I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.
Someone questioned whether Dropbox could compete with Amazon at scale, but decided to delete it. This is a really valid question. I recalled a while back that Backblaze asked a similar question and came up with a really cool solution.
I see this as Dropbox's future. PaaS is good for getting started, but with numbers like what's shown in that blog post, it's hard to argue that something like S3 is really priced at commodity levels.
This same line of reasoning came up with the last few Netflix stories to hit HN. Netflix depends on Amazon who runs a competing on-demand video service. The general consensus is that Amazon's divisions are independent enough to not try anything funny. More importantly, Amazon is big enough that they wouldn't risk the publicity fallout of monkeying with the competition's services.
counterpoint: Dropbox is a great product, clever tech, insightful marketing etc. Even the YC application was great. And I think there's a large market (even its present size is more than enough to sate my own avarice), but... it doesn't seem that it could become a truly huge company (like Xerox, Google), without launching a series of increasingly unrelated products. Though perhaps that's true of many huge companies (e.g. Apple, Sony, HP - even Microsoft has Office).
> Benioff predicts sales could hit $100 million this year. (The company declined to comment.)
Unfortunately, a prediction; and also by someone not privy to actual figures...
> Dropbox reportedly experiences well over 10 times year-over-year growth...
Sounds pretty good!
> ...and positive cash flow.
The mildest expression of profitability possible. Though I'm pretty sure they're doing way better than >0.
From scanning many acquisitions, my feeling is of the order of $200 million. Though I'm basing that mainly on business acquisition (e.g. by Oracle), so I might be very off for consumer acquisitions (considering youtube, facebook, twitter etc).
When we were trying to figure out if Dropbox would be a good sync tool for Leanpub, Peter went in to a local coffee shop and asked a bunch of people if they'd ever heard of Dropbox. All of the baristas and everyone else in their 20s had, and had accounts. About half of the people 30 or older had heard of it, and most of them had accounts.
We were pretty impressed with the numbers, and we ended up going with Dropbox, and we've never regretted it.
My mom came to me earlier asking me to help her install Dropbox. She's about as informed about computer stuff as i am about fashion. That's a good sign for Dropbox :-)
While I'm sure Dropbox has their work cut out, you know they are onto something when you run into their flyers outside college dorms cross country in Chapel Hill, NC.
Today I was at a University small business lecture. Someone asked one of the entrepreneurs "What was your biggest mistake?". The guy said his laptop had been stolen, but luckily it was all auto-backed up onto Dropbox. A nice anecdote and good press!
I love dropbox and we use it personally and for our company (we are paid subscribers). But it seems to me that this space has fewer barriers to entry than say Groupon. People argue that Groupon has little barriers to entry but the fact is that it cost a lot to sell and get merchants on board. Dropbox is a very unique and helpful product but what will stop the competition from creating something similar and possibly better?
Now is maybe the really scary time for Dropbox - here come the "me too's" including corporates who will say "Hey looks like people are starting to want this file storage and sharing thingy" - we can do that too and offer it to our own customers.
I had the same thought as SwellJoe around early 2008: That's been done, it ain't gonna go anywhere big. Obviously failed prediction on my part.
So the question is, what made Dropbox successful? There are plenty of players in this area (some of them are older than dropbox): box.net, mozy.com, Windows Live mesh, backblaze.
Furthermore, techies can easily do backup to their own S3 account, but they love Dropbox.
What's the success factors? YC? Being MIT graduates? The clever "Tell your friends and get more space for free" email? The market is just HUGE?
I like Dropbox but i use it less often. What i am waiting for is the same solution from Apple. Their cloud facility has been just finished and they will probably offer similar service not later than this year. It might not start as pure storage facility but will start by account and device activation from cloud, iphoto & music backup and then after figuring out how this cloud thing work will probably offer similar subscription fee based service. After all why they still didn't buy Dropbox? Probably they are working on it.
I'm glad the article pointed out the cartoon dinosaur riding a shark on the jobs page, even though they mistook it as not taking things seriously, instead of convincingly signalling, by the fact of its nature and presence (as an awesome and surprising drawing on a recruitment page that's subversive of conventional expectations for a potential employer), the claim made in the heading on that page, that Dropbox is a pretty sweet place to work.
Dropbox it's certainly one of the most helpful startups for the average guy.
I put into use at the last company I was working for (a non-tech company) and everyone got immediately hooked on Dropbox. It made their file-sharing much easier.
So I honestly understand this article, even though for us it's been around for so long.
Any media outlet tempted to use a "you've never heard of" headline should seriously reconsider. Guaranteed to irritate everyone who HAS heard of it instantly.
I heard a radio report in NZ over summer about the kids these days using words like Cool and Wicked in ways that weren't their original meaning.
Someone deserves a medal for epic trolling.
(I don't know what the station was -- I was in a hire car and channel surfing and decided to listen to the news broadcast)
Told my parents about Dropbox (for about the 10th time) 4 weeks ago, they're finally using. Told my in-laws about it on Monday. I don't think that they meant you (or the other millions of people already using it)
