There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google.
Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience. Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.
Edit: Hey guys, it's the only primary source I could find citing Drew Houston's conversation with Steve Jobs, wherein Steve Jobs stated that Dropbox was a feature, and not a product.
> [Drew Houston] reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.
With "Not Even Wrong" incoherent nonsense like that, Forbes doesn't belong on HN.
Update: I haven't found video or slides about Rian Hunter's explanation, but I did find this note about his CUSEC 2012 talk:
At the Dropbox talk, Rian Hunter explained how Dropbox was able to integrate into the Mac OS X finder and the hoops that they had to jump through to implement this feature. The technical aspects of the talk were centered on how the engineers used very low level C code to trick the operating system into thinking that the Dropbox client was a part of the finder when it actually was not. An unexpected but enjoyable surprise was the presence of an Apple engineer who worked on the OS X operating system. It was almost if trying to break the software was a game of cat and mouse between Apple and Dropbox, but in the end, both Rian and the engineer created an extremely informative and enjoyable discussion.
Sure, but it was the only primary source I could find for Drew Houston recounting his conversation with Steve Jobs. Most all the other coverage at the time was blogspam.
I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the PDFs online and offline.
I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux there even isn't an official client.
Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files that you shared and unsharing from there.
I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is seamless.
That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.
Certainly. Google has plenty of customers signed up for Google Accounts so users use Google Docs for doc sharing, which eventually means running Box.com inside Google, offering GDrive. Which reminds of Google Wave as various technology used in Wave was eventually used in other Google products, most notably in Google Doc (although Google Doc was a production acquisition).
Maybe 'dead' for personal usage however as part of Google Apps it is a no brainer and integrates nicely with the whole of the Apps suite.
I am prepared to eat my words however I would be extremely surprised if Google kill off Drive for Apps.
This is such a strange strawman argument. Dropbox is not just some dumb storage. You may think syncing across computers and sharing are trivial things, but they are not.
Even if you're right, maybe it's not so bad if your "feature" company makes more money than most other product companies and is heading straight for an IPO.
What is seen as a feature from mickeysofts point of view, is still a proper product from dropbox point of view.
And when will users complaint? When their storage, data is gone/lost etc, so why would mickeysoft even bother to provide storage. Let dropbox take the blame if data goes missing, M$ part worked flawless, it is dropbox that lost your data.
Surely they have deduplication capabilities, unless you're implying that the Utah data center exists solely to deal with people using NPM in their projects.
Seeing how courageously Dropbox moves into the territory of giants (first Cloudon, now Google Drive turf)
the infamous Jobsian "you're a feature not a product" seems to be an iconic short-sighted mistake.
"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free"
Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth.
The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why oil could drop 50% in the last 60 days. It's why Paul Ehrlich and John Malthus were wrong. And why Dropbox could end up being a truly great company.
When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!
It has an air of truth. Dropbox is bar none the best sync client. Almost unbelievably so.
But they were in 2010 too. And if you time travelled from 2010 to 2015, you wouldn't really notice anything materially different between Dropbox then and now.
I don't get it either, they have so many competitors and no one seems to actually bother to compete with Dropbox in the client space. I want to like Google Drive just because it's cheaper and integrates with Gmail and all the other Google services I use, but there's still no Linux client and it's just not as simple as Dropbox. Dropbox is just solid and available everywhere.
Perhaps it's harder to make something like Dropbox work? I wouldn't know; just wondering. Having Guido Van Rossum on board either means that they're doing hard stuff, or they like hiring overqualified people...
> When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!
I agree, this is a kind of stupid mistake people keep making given that everything around us proves an opposite point - that resource usage always rises up to the limits. We will invent new ways to waste^H^H^H^H^Huse storage, just like we invented new ways to use up surplus bandwidth (video streaming) or electricity (well, everything now). Random potential use - with petabyte disks it starts to make sense to run full-HD surveillance all the time. Or to have even more bloated web frameworks that download half of the Internet as their dependencies.
That's what I was wondering. I switched from Dropbox to btsync a few months ago, when I filled up my Dropbox (and Dropbox became inaccessible in China). The sole disadvantage (which is a direct and logical result of all the advantages), is that the syncing computers need to be online concurrently. In every other way I've found it superior to Dropbox.
Of course, what's going to happen to btsync as a "product", I don't have a clue. But given the fact that you can host a private tracker and essentially run the whole ecosystem yourself means that the worst that could happen is it might become abandonware.
Yep. We basically have an always-on Raspberry Pi in the closet to have a peer available all the time.
Though reading about their future attempts to monetize BTSync, I am not too hopeful about its future.
People will scream Syncthing, but that's often not a solution since you need to do port forwarding, which may not always be possible (e.g. if you are IPv4-connected via DS-Lite).
That's a little depressing. Not that they shouldn't make money from their work but... it seems like there's so little to the actual code. Here's hoping that they keep it to an open source project I can donate funds to.
> In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.
If they're smart, it will be. They're just simply not going to make money otherwise. Get users on board for free, create a nice product to use that feels familiar, now tell them to get their bosses to let you use it for work.
They've been running that model from the outset, I don't see this as being a huge headache for them.
> the cost for storage is infinite and free
If thats so then it will also be cheap for them to give users the same.
I still think dropbox has a good product and will continue to iterate just fine. The product is all in the implementation, its not storage. Storage is the one and only feature of dropboxes app and sharability.
(disclaimer: stopped using dropbox when they had that major security flaw years ago)
Dropbox has an app ecosystem, Drive does not. The network effect is strong - if I'm a developer who wants to implement a trivial sync-across-devices feature, I'm going to use Dropbox because it's something my user probably already has.
Google Drive offers nothing that Dropbox doesn't, except more storage, which as you mentioned, is quickly becoming meaningless.
There are a boatload of apps that integrate with Google Drive. I am not sure how one can claim that there is no ecosystem; It looks pretty healthy to me.
I didn't say Dropbox would go away because obviously a player of their market size won't but to say Job's was wrong about them being a feature is also misleading.
So they have some clout with developers, SMB's and enterprise customers that's nice but a majority of their revenue comes from consumers who will find a hard time paying for Dropbox when Google will offer Drive for free.
Cost of storage is already almost-infinite and almost-free, and yet Dropbox is thriving. Any big (or even not so big) tech company could have built Dropbox, and yet none did; they all produced a half-assed attempt that failed miserably in the marketplace.
Recently, it was reported that an MS me-too product was incapable of dealing with file paths of a certain length. In 2014!
I think this line "a feature not a product" is really really misguided (to avoid using a stronger word); a feature perfectly executed is precisely what a product should be.
So let's talk again in 5 years and see how Dropbox is doing, yes.
Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free.
It depends. Microsoft and Google sell you storage cheaply because they want you in their ecosystem. Since Dropbox doesn't have other big products, their focus has always been on integration with other apps (e.g. 1Password, Fastmail, etc.).
If there integration continues to be better than the rest. That's definitely a selling point.
And me. I think Dropbox is an essential service. I think of it as a complete product, since when I need a file I go to the directory or the app on my phone. Across all my machines, it just works. If google had their service earlier, I might have picked it up. However, for now I will use dropbox and happily pay for the service.
EDIT: There are some links showing up now with more content. When this was first posted there was very little to be found to confirm the author... I'll leave my comment for posterity though.
This doesn't look like it's officially from Dropbox? (I can't find any blog posts) No thanks.
It looks handy, but I'm not so sure I want to give someone access to my GMail AND my Dropbox when they can't even tell me who they are OR make it clear that they are NOT the service provider. Super sketch.
This is a big deal since it is Dropbox themselves providing more seamless integration into the actual Gmail web experience. Impact is not just innovation but the scale in which it's adopted.
Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience. Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.