It seems like they are scoring a lot of really big power players from other great companies. Does it seem like everyone is going there until it goes public for the payout?
Yeah I think that's pretty inferable. Regardless, Drew and company are doing an amazing job getting all this talent--coming IPO or not, these are a lot of power people coming in and they can't have been easy to attain.
It'll be quite the solid team to showcase to investors come IPO time.
The sync/sharing/storage aspect of the product is mature given the relative one-dimensionality of file storage.
Storage, Syncing and sharing should be transparent to the users - so clearly, they need to ensure a continued robust, secure service - but one that never gets between a user and their data.
The acquisition of Mailbox is a great move assuming they bolt Mailbox on-top of Dropbox.
What I would like to see is API integrations across services such that I can eventually store all MY data in MY account and allow other services access to it.
This could cause an issue for some services - but the fact is that I don't want to host all my mail with gmail, all my pics in FB, etc...
I want a storage glob and a set structure for "pics go here" "docs go here" "mail goes here" and a range of apps that access the data in an authorized, yet ad-hoc manner - but at the end of the day, the data is MINE.
You bring up a good point, which is what I keep wondering too - where do they go? Dropbox already has sync APIs [0] across both iOS and Android (and presumably desktop), which must be their big bet to get to the central cloud store that you mention.
The part that is lacking is the metadata layer for pics/audio etc which allows apps to read others files, but that could be an easy layer on top of this API.
I'd like this too and might start work on something over the summer. When you say 'my' data I'm assuming you mean 'remains under my control'.
Some of the ideas have been research topics and may ripe for demos later in the year. If you've got s moment, you can check out perscon.net for an overview.
This is exactly what I was talking about. There are a ton of challenges - and obviously this is against what the market/industry is looking to provide (they want to control the service, and see your data as a part of their service)
But we need to move in this direction and have some balance between the user owning their online experience, especially when that experience is an actual extension of who they are - and services that are able to provide portions of that experience in a way where they can be profitable and viable businesses.
Now that they've brought in this talent, it's just a matter of time before all those brains start working together--and once this happens, you'll see the product naturally evolve. I don't have any specific ideas as to what it will involve into, though.
FWIW Groupon hired a lot of bigs from other companies prior to IPO, but it was more about ecommerce executives than software and design. There are a lot of great people that want to work at a hot proven company (not a small startup), and Dropbox probably fits that best.
I would not think of 37signals as a startup because they're not focused on growth, in search of a business model, in search of funding, or going through other startup-specific issues.
