Dropbox is now at the inflection point of having become a standard. All of the various cloud-drive solutions are gauging themselves in comparison to them; as such, they have won.
Will SkyDrive manage to become a good competitor? I would expect so, especially given how Microsoft can push into the field by piggybacking it on Office, etc.
However, should Microsoft? No.
For Microsoft, SkyDrive will not sell more copies of Windows or Office. Instead, it will simply be another waste of money and resources on a feature that will not sway people to their products. If you're going to get Office, you're going to get Office - a cloud drive won't convince you over some other offering.
Not really - my point is that SkyDrive adds nothing to Microsoft's strategy.
It won't really sell large numbers of Office, and the fact that less than 1% of people use more than 7gb (the free tier) means that it will make very little money overall.
Office will certainly sell subscriptions of SkyDrive, but they'll be free subscriptions mostly and the people won't really care about it. It doesn't make the core product offering more compelling, which seems to be their core strategy based on the yearly price.
Dropbox has done so well because they aren't just the first mover - they are the standard by which others are judged. With this in mind, Microsoft is making a mistake trying to make an offering to compete with it. They should have just made a deal with Dropbox in the first place.
Dropbox integration would be a fantastic selling point for Office; SkyDrive integration is not.
> "Dropbox integration would be a fantastic selling point for Office; SkyDrive integration is not"
I think you may be discounting businesses that actually purchase a lot of Office licences. SkyDrive can be a way of providing file-syncing and sharing that's 'good-enough' for their employees/company. (edit: by which I mean it's a valid strategy to try and protect your turf).
I can see an analogy here with Sharepoint. My (limited) experiences with Sharepoint have been annoying and tedious yet the fact that it integrates with existing MS products and is 'good-enough' has made it very successful for Microsoft [1]. I'm not trying to suggest that SkyDrive could be a $1b business but that we shouldn't write it off so quickly.
Dropbox has little "market penetration" in the overall market of MS Office buyers.
Dropbox is familiar to us and the circles we are in, but that doesn't mean it has any traction at all among the middle-America soccer moms using MS Word to make flyers for little league or the pet shelter. (The recent photo sync update should help with this.)
Techies typically "misunderestimate" the traction of entrenched tools among normals and the value of building add-ons for those entrenched tools.
Will SkyDrive manage to become a good competitor? I would expect so, especially given how Microsoft can push into the field by piggybacking it on Office, etc.
However, should Microsoft? No.
For Microsoft, SkyDrive will not sell more copies of Windows or Office. Instead, it will simply be another waste of money and resources on a feature that will not sway people to their products. If you're going to get Office, you're going to get Office - a cloud drive won't convince you over some other offering.