Jobs never changed his interpretation of things. He did in fact feel cloud storage was a feature and not a product, and that's exactly what iCloud is. For Apple it's a feature that will hopefully tie people in to their iOS devices. And with the likelihood that over time they will offer greater amounts of storage for free or a minimum payment, that's not good for Dropbox.
I like Dropbox, I use it almost daily. But so far I've never actually paid for it. Same, so far, with iCloud. To Apple, this would be largely irrelevant, but for Dropbox, that's not so great.
As fun as consumer services are most people aren't going to pay for them (or will pay very little). The real value in these types of services are Power Users and Business.
As someone who considers himself a power user and who runs IT for a business I can tell you Dropbox has been very effective in its marketing. We use Box.net and my users are constantly pushing for Dropbox because they use it at home and find it preferable. If Dropbox had the features we probably would have switched by now.
Same with Power Users in that word of mouth is likely to influence these people (though again I'd argue features in that the streaming ability of SugarSync is a real advantage for those users).
So as crazy as it seems Dropbox is essentially using you for marketing. Think about it, companies pay millions for a couple minutes of Superbowl time. With that money Dropbox gives millions of users a free service and uses word of mouth to carry it along.
What is the difference between you not paying apple or you not paying dropbox?
The upside for dropbox is you commenting here that you are using them and that their free tier is usable, so you are effectively a part of their marketing arm.
If you really get utility out of dropbox then it is in your best interest that they continue to exist. Sooner or later that might translate into you pulling your wallet.
Freemium offerings are predicated on statistics and dropbox seems to be doing just fine in spite of the freeloading nature of some of their customers.
> What is the difference between you not paying apple or you not paying dropbox?
Dropbox gets money from you paying for dropbox (it's a service), Apple gets money from you buying Apple hardware, iCloud is just there to give you reason to get Apple devices and keep buying Apple devices.
> Freemium offerings are predicated on statistics and dropbox seems to be doing just fine in spite of the freeloading nature of some of their customers.
Absolutely, but Dropbox's goal will still be to push you on the "premium" side of "freemium".
There is no difference to me, there isn't much difference to Apple but there is to dropbox - their business is dependent on users paying for cloud storage.
The problem with that, as I see it, is that in the longer run cloud storage becomes a commodity. Hence Jobs' description of it as a feature, instead of a product.
Access is also a commodity. That doesn't stop ISPs the world over from making a killing on it.
Yes, it is a feature if you've already got an OS and a bunch of devices out there.
But it is a product if you can do this seamlessly across all os's, and all devices.
Both perspectives are equally valid in this case. In the end to the DropBox guys their product vision was worth more to them than Jobs' feature vision allowed him to pay for it.
Time will tell if that was the right decision, for either party.
I love dropbox - and I just recently switched to a paid account.
I have gotten my whole team on it - we have a virtual team of 10 consultants all working from our homes. Dropbox is key to keeping everything between us shared.
We haven't yet gone for the Team account - but we will be doing so shortly. It is expensive - but the simplicity and value it offers it (so far) unmatched.
Have they improved on their lack of security yet? I'd recommend using wuala for work documents as they offer client side encryption, if you don't mind having java around.
This actually scares me a lot about dropbox. I've had clients share very sensitive documents and code via an emailed dropbox link. If you are in charge of security, dropbox is a data-loss prevention nightmare. It's too easy to share things. I can only imagine what kind of IP dropbox has access to.
iCloud is not cross platform. Dropbox has its place for this feature alone. In fact I use Dropbox mainly for syncing dotfiles between my various Mac OS/Linux/Windows machines iCloud just can't do that. The corporate world also lives on Windows and is a huge market.
